Author: saxasalt

Most people assume that Hitler’s theories could never again get a foothold in modern academia. It is a comfortable Western conceit that is built on the idea that humanities departments in universities inoculate the West against totalitarian ideas. It is inconceivable to most people that tyrannical or near-tyrannical nostrums could ever find a home in the humanities departments of modern Western universities.

After all, don’t Antifa activists bravely oppose “fascism”? Aren’t students quick to detect any instance of oppression? Don’t professors build their careers on an effort to create a new world of choice and freedom?

It would be logical to think that the disciplines that focus most on human experience would be the most richly informed by the lessons taught bloodily by the 20th century and thus most immune to any totalitarian, radical ideology that would seek to assert itself with muscular fanaticism upon the world.

But this is not so.

Within the modern academy, humanities departments are Petri dishes that spout radical theories. Ideology has been seamlessly woven into knowledge production such that the latter is now governed by the former (and is thus, not knowledge production at all).

Humanities scholars seldom any longer seek to discover and describe reality. Rather, they attempt to refashion reality as if it were play dough so that it suits their ideas. In the process they have not only dissolved much of the meaning of the study of humanities, but they have fired up their students to control and dominate campus life. Their students learn the fine arts of bullying, intimidation, and harassing others in the name of justice.

For many years, black students at Evergreen State University have held a “Day of Absence” in which they do not attend their campus for a day. They meet to discuss issues relevant to them. Last year, however, minority students and faculty at Evergreen State University decided they would like to invert their strategy. They demanded that white students and staff should stay away from the campus on the “Day of Absence” and that only minority students should attend.

Professor Brett Weinstein (in the hard sciences, naturally) resisted this demand on the entirely reasonable grounds that it constituted an attempt to intimidate and control the campus environment which is inimical to freedom, but congruent with oppression. He wrote:

There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles… and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.

Professor Weinstein said that he would be attending campus on the nominated date and encouraged other white students to do the same.

The firestorm that broke against him and his wife was a demonstration of intimidation that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the dark inner workings of a dictatorship where mobs are enlisted to “do their worst” against any outspoken non-conformist. Brett Weinstein received death threats. Concerted efforts were made to get him fired, including organised marches across the campus, impromptu searches for the professor by vigilante students, and “fire Brett” graffiti which appeared on campus. Efforts were later made to get campus police fired as well.

The campus police advised Weinstein that he should absent himself from work for a few days because they could not guarantee his safety. From the moment he made his stand, Weinstein was accused of racism by students and activists on social media. His effort to explain and defend his were also considered racist. Students drew a line between his stance and the fatal attack of some unrelated men in Portland, Oregon who had tried to break up an anti-Muslim rant. This, they argued, showed how much imminent danger existed for minorities in American society and why Weinstein’s stance was actually dangerous and unreasonable.

Ultimately, Professor Weinstein and his wife left Evergreen State University and successfully sued it. The university president George Bridges said:

We may disagree with each other. However, disagreement is one thing; dehumanization is another. Over the week, a few members of the Evergreen community have used traditional and social media to malign, mock or misrepresent those with whom they disagree. While the majority of students, faculty and staff are fully engaged in the teaching and learning work of the college, a few are on a destructive course of action that hurts themselves and gives a distorted and false impression of our community.

But Brett Weinstein told the media:

The president’s carefully crafted statement is clearly intended to support a false narrative about the present state of our campus, and the extraordinary events of this past week. No one at the college has yet acknowledged that I and my students were specifically followed, harassed and doxed. If it is now safe to return, it is only because the intimidation campaign against us backfired so spectacularly and has now been called off as a matter of PR damage control.

The harassment and intimidation at Evergreen State is a mere demonstration of how frightening universities have become for free thinkers, and how hostage they are held to the shibboleths and grievance theories of their humanities departments. Worse, these students and their professors often believe they have been given the mandate of revolution to try and break down the matrix of imaginary grievances and hurts they claim to see around them. They take their intolerant, blinkered, bulldozer approach into the wider society where it causes real harm.

They thus justify the introduction of new unscientific social ideas into psychology, education, religion, and history. These students rise to positions of influence HR departments, in media newsrooms, in corporations, and in government agencies where they continue their social crusade. Through intimidation these social theories and ideas then become the institutional culture of the broader society. The theories are applied to the real world with often bizarre, expensive, harmful, or unjust results for families, individuals and children. Nonetheless, these radical principles are not permitted to be questioned or dissented from. Those who would do so are often relentlessly bullied and abused in the manner so sadly exemplified by Professor Weinstein.

HOW BAD IS IT?

The rot of humanities in modern universities seriously imperils the future of the academy. Over a year ago three (left-leaning) scholars – James Lindsey, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose – decided they were unable to ignore the dysfunction that now plagues the social sciences. They decided to begin a project in which they would visibly and publicly demonstrate how intellectually moribund and bankrupt the humanities had become by writing a series of spoof papers and getting them published in prestigious and reputable peer-reviewed journals.

Publication of a paper in a peer-reviewed journal is the Holy Grail of scholarship. Not only is it a way for an academic to gain notoriety and influence – since scholarly journals are regarded as high-quality source material for citations – but it is also a standard condition of tenure in most universities. To get a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal means that you have made a worthy scholarly contribution that has passed a process of being checked, vetted and approved by peer experts for accuracy and value.

Publication means that the paper is adding to the specialised knowledge contained within the field and is consistent with the knowledge that already exists. Peer-review is a means by which scholars testify that a methodology is sound and a work is reliable.

Lindsey, Boghossian and Pluckrose successfully published seven spoof papers that ranged from the absurd to the outright dangerous. In one case, they demonstrated they could publish Hitler’s theorems of grievance, modified with a little grease and spanner-work to suit contemporary feminist ideology, with high praise from the reviewers. In the name of a fictitious Ph.D holder, they were able to get a paper published that utilised Hitler’s multi-point plan in Chapter 12 of Mein Kampf as a basic template for feminist struggle.

In another peer-reviewed paper they argued that astrology was a more feminist “science” than astronomy and thus and deserved a role within astronomy. They also successfully published an utterly meaningless paper about “feminist artificial intelligence” which was written in dense, impenetrable prose. Absurder examples included a highly-commended paper in which they argued that dog parks perpetuate a canine rape culture with systematic oppression against “the oppressed dog”.

Perhaps the most ridiculous paper of all was written by James Lindsey featuring poetry derived from an online teenage-angst poetry generator merged with a long, rambling anecdote about an imaginary feminist “moon meeting” at which women rub wooden carvings of their genitals.

Each paper was intended to demonstrate a different ideological defect within the field of humanities. For example, they argue that the publication of their dog park paper showed that, “Journals will accept arguments which should be clearly ludicrous and unethical if they provide (an unfalsifiable) way to perpetuate notions of toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, and implicit bias“.

Certainly, the idea that dogs could be oppressed by rape culture is absurd and it defies belief that anyone could take this seriously. But ideology tends to have the effect of corroding critical faculty in those who fanatically hold to it, until the grotesquely nonsensical is advanced as proof of the ideology. Indeed, the dog park paper has eerie parallels to the story that circulated in German schools in the 1930’s in which students were taught about the discovery of a remarkable talking dog, unlike anything seen before, that had been successfully able to tell scientists that he had undying faith in his Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.

Another spoof paper argued that heterosexual men rarely anally stimulate themselves with sex toys because of a deep-seated homophobia and bigotry against transgender people. This paper was described as “rich and exciting” by one reviewer who apologised for being so enthused but explained she could not help it because the article was so “marvellous”. The reviewer described the piece as an “interesting contribution to knowledge”. Yet, once again, the premise of the article is blatantly unfair, cannot be proved on the basis of objective data, and is exclusively grounded on the idea that something is innately wrong with heterosexual male sexual desire.

Lindsey, Boghossian and Pluckrose concluded that: “journals will accept ludicrous arguments if they support (unfalsifiable) claims that common (and harmless) sexual choices made by straight men are actually homophobic, transphobic, and anti-feminist.”

It is hard to come to any other conclusion given that the article was purposefully written so that it amounted to little more than a sophisticated attack on normal male desire. Yet though its premise is clearly discriminatory and biased, it was sufficiently dressed up in the garb of supposed academic writing to allow it to gain a respectable receptivity within the suffocating ideological confines of humanities scholarship.

Only ideology could explain why such a paper could be deemed a serious academic effort given its unhinged nature. For example, at one point the article strongly hinted that there was something bigoted, defective, or sinister (“transhysteria”) at work when heterosexual men were interviewed and said they did not wish to be anally penetrated by another man or by a transgender woman with a penis. The article posited that this was demonstrable proof of the existence of a masculine construct that opposes and oppresses homosexual and transgender people. In other words, the paper was essentially arguing that heterosexual men must engage in homosexual sex to some degree in order for them to cease participating in an alleged hegemonic oppressive structure.

The conclusions made by this article were, of course, supported by no empirical data. Instead, like many social science articles it used “qualitative data”. It referenced personal anecdotes, interviews conducted with very small numbers of people, and citations from books such as “The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure“, a text purporting to teach men how to engage in “anal play”. This is the basis, it seems, for making a “serious contribution” to a scientific understanding of human sexuality.

No wonder ideologies of sexuality are among the most intolerant on university campuses – taking no prisoners as they hack their way across the intellectual landscape – for the substance upon which they are based add up to self-affirming fantasy. But this fantasy has such a thin membrane that it is not be able to withstand the most basic questions or elementary scrutiny, just as an over-inflated balloon bursts when it makes contact with anything angular. The only solution, therefore, is to silence the would-be questioners and shout down any effort at dissent or scrutiny.

The Atlantic magazine rightly observed that such papers do not only:

…expose the low standards of the journals that publish this kind of dreck… It also demonstrates the extent to which many of them are willing to license discrimination if it serves ostensibly progressive goals.

This was most vividly seen in a paper arguing that students of “privilege” should be made to give “experiential reparations” by sitting in chains on the floor, being spoken over, and treated with serious inhumanity. This paper was not published by the journal it was submitted to on the basis that the privileged students making the reparations were being treated with too much compassion. Nonetheless the authors were invited to rewrite and resubmit.

Lindsey, Boghossian and Pluckrose comment:

This paper insists that the most privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence throughout the term. Even more, it insists that students with high privilege could benefit from adding on “experiential reparations,” such as sitting in the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over, as an educational “opportunity” within the class.

The reviewers’ only concerns with these points so far have been that (1) we approach the topic with too much compassion for the students who are being subjected to this, and (2) we risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.

To correct for this, the reviewers urged us to make sure we avoid “recentering the needs of the privileged.” They asked us to incorporate Megan Boler’s approach called “pedagogy of discomfort” and Barbara Applebaum’s insistence that the privileged learn from this discomfort rather than being coddled or having their own experiences (suffering) “recentered.” It also utilizes Robin DiAngelo’s now-famous concept of “white fragility” to explain why students subjected to this treatment will object to it, and uses that to justify the more cruel treatment suggested by the reviewers. The reviewers acknowledged that they believe this “fragility” is the correct interpretation for student pushback against being told to stay silent and sit in the floor, possibly in chains, throughout the semester.

They go on to observe that the enthusiastic reception by reviewers and the invitation to resubmit by the journal demonstrates:

Patently unfair, inhumane, and abusive treatments of students will be acceptable in educational theory if it is framed as an opportunity to teach them about the problems of privilege.

In rebutting left-wing defences of the journals, The Atlantic commented:

…it is nonsensical to insist that nonsense scholarship doesn’t matter because you don’t like the motives of the people who exposed it, or because some other forms of scholarship may also contain nonsense. If certain fields of study cannot reliably differentiate between real scholarship and noxious bloviating, they become deeply suspect. And if they are so invested in overcoming injustice that they are willing to embrace rank cruelty as long as it is presented in the right kind of progressive jargon, they are worsening the problems they purport to address.

It demonstrates how rotten the timbers have become within the field of humanities and perhaps goes some way to explaining why the discipline is so often held in derision. For instead of being a machine to create knowledge about the true human condition, humanities departments – especially those dealing with gender and sexuality – now manufacture a worldview that is largely immune to knowledge or the tools of reason.

The escalating authoritarianism of this no-holds-barred, grievance-detecting, bullying social fascism would make a natural transplant into the fascism of yesteryear. This is what is flowing from politicised humanities departments and journals that are sunk in ideological decay. It embraces a wide swathe of fields like gender studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, and others which are all complicit in packaging such grotesque and preposterous ideas in the name of remedying “oppression”.

WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?

Lindsey and Pluckrose (2018) argue in their essay that the excesses of students and the circus sideshow of radicalism on campuses merely represent the symptoms of a longer-term malaise within the humanities. An intellectual virus is at work. It is characterised by a number of features, including a binary, good-vs-bad mode thinking in which students memorise matrices that purport to show dialectics of oppression; something termed “intersectionality” which is the fashionable theoretical engine driving much of the harm.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University writes:

But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It’s not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile…. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.

And here’s the strategically brilliant move made by intersectionality: all of the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately. They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

The intellectual virus is also characterised by low-quality research which suffers from a “replication crisis” – a term coined by Cofnas, Carl, and Woodley (2015) in a paper that questioned the scientific foundations of much of what passes for research within the humanities.

Replication refers to the ability of other researchers to duplicate the results of an experiment or a study. This constitutes a cornerstone of the scientific method. Since the scientific method is concerned with discovering objective truths about how the world works, multiple researchers in different places and contexts performing the same experiments should get the same results if the experiment truly addresses an objective reality. In this way, the results are shown to be independent of the researcher.

For instance, a researcher using an Ohmmeter to gauge the electrical resistance of different metals – perhaps copper, iron, and gold – will get the same results no matter how many times the experiment is repeated. Providing the variables of the experiment remain the same (e.g. amount of metal, the length of the metal pieces, amount of voltage etc.) the results will be identical.

Or, suppose a researcher drops some weights from a fixed height and measures their impact velocity. The results of this experiment will be the same when it is repeated in London, Johannesburg, or Timbuktu. It will be the same because gravitation and its effects are the same. Furthermore, the results of these experiments will be able to be duplicated by multiple researchers with all kinds of personal beliefs.

It will not matter whether the researcher votes for conservatives or liberals, or is a fanatical vegetarian. It will not matter if the researcher is a Christian or a pagan. It will not matter if they cavort in Bacchanalian parties and slosh enough alcohol down their gullet to stun a whale, or if they adhere to godly morality and self-restraint as revealed in scripture. None of this will matter.

It will not matter because if the researchers follow the same method the experiment’s results will be successfully replicated, thus proving that the experiment is built around an objective principle or law that is true. It further proves that the researcher himself has not brought an uncertain variable or a personal bias to the experiment and has influenced the results.

There has been a breakdown of this principle within the humanities, especially in regards to experiments that utilise “qualitative research” rather than the quantitative research of the hard sciences. Thus, social scientists often perform experiments and treat the results as solid even when those results cannot be replicated by other researchers. This has been a problem for decades and the lack of scrutiny and scientific rigour has allowed the findings of these experiments to become virtually unchallenged lore.

Some of the most celebrated social experiments have been unethical, like the infamous (and unethical) Robbers Cave experiment led by Muzafer Sherif:

Sherif’s cover story was that he was running a summer camp in Middle Grove. His plan was to bring a group of boys together, allow them to make friends, then separate them into two factions to compete for a prize. At this point, he believed, they would forget their friendships and start demonising one another. The pièce de résistance was to come at the end: Sherif planned to set a forest fire in the vicinity of the camp. Facing a shared threat, they would be forced to work as one team again.

….

In 50s Middle Grove, things didn’t go according to plan either, though the surprise was of a different nature. Despite his pretence of leaving the 11-year-olds to their own devices, Sherif and his research staff, posing as camp counsellors and caretakers, interfered to engineer the result they wanted. He believed he could make the two groups, called the Pythons and the Panthers, sworn enemies via a series of well-timed “frustration exercises”. These included his assistants stealing items of clothing from the boys’ tents and cutting the rope that held up the Panthers’ homemade flag, in the hope they would blame the Pythons. One of the researchers crushed the Panthers’ tent, flung their suitcases into the bushes and broke a boy’s beloved ukulele. To Sherif’s dismay, however, the children just couldn’t be persuaded to hate each other.

After losing a tug-of-war, the Pythons declared that the Panthers were in fact the better team and deserved to win. The boys concluded that the missing clothes were the result of a mix-up at the laundry. And, after each of the Pythons swore on a Bible that they didn’t cut down the Panthers’ flag, any conflict “fizzled”. By the time of the incident with the suitcases and the ukulele, the boys had worked out that they were being manipulated. Instead of turning on each other, they helped put the tent back up and eyed their “camp counsellors” with suspicion. “Maybe you just wanted to see what our reactions would be,” one of them said.

The robustness of the boy’s “civilised” values came as a blow to Sherif, making him angry enough to want to punch one of his young academic helpers. It turned out that the strong bonds forged at the beginning of the camp weren’t easily broken. Thankfully, he never did start the forest fire – he aborted the experiment when he realised it wasn’t going to support his hypothesis.

Lindsey and Pluckrose point out that the lack of objectivity in research has allowed quack studies to gain legitimacy. One need not be a fortune teller to see how dangerous this is not only for the mission of the university, but also for wider society.

They write:

The difficulty of measuring the rigor of research in the humanities and the relative ease of producing humanities research (say, as compared to studies in the hard sciences) make it particularly prone to ideological bias and proliferate poor scholarship.

This, unfortunately, is a problem shared by the social sciences. A 2012 study by researchers Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, cited in Cofnas et al, found that while conservative and liberal social scientists were equally likely to discriminate against each others’ papers in review, liberals are so over-represented in the field that they face a only a 5% chance of having their paper reviewed by someone who might politically discriminate against them.

Conservatives, by contrast, face an 80% chance of the same. The departments which traffic in fashionable nonsense therefore have natural advantages in producing reams of low-quality or outright bad scholarship: High levels of political motivation to agitate the system in their favor, relative ease of producing scholarship, and a high likelihood of sympathetic reviewers biased in their favor. This has led to administrative architectures that now unjustly support them and prejudicial control over key sectors of the academy — like educational theory, which creates a self-strengthening feedback loop for them — which enable them to push their agenda into the university system. The result is increased legitimacy for certain criticisms of the academy that are not judiciously applied, are being politically weaponized, and are likely to explode into radioactive political warfare.

In other words, the humanities departments of many universities have been turned into think tanks for liberal politics. They produce the theory and churn out the students that are amenable to supporting the assumptions and worldview of the left. It is not that these students are better educated and that their superior education turns them toward the left, as the popular conceit among liberals would have it.

Rather, it is that these students are intellectually docile, cowed by an unchallenged stream of propaganda that sounds sophisticated, and are never exposed to rival ideas or viewpoints. This produces students who cannot defend their views in debate against a knowledgeable opponent, and when challenged may even go so far as to call for the campus police.

These students and their identity ideology – what could be properly termed social fascism – are going to be moving into the wider world. They are intolerant of dissent. They are utterly certain they are correct. And they will bully and intimidate not only people who disagree with them, but will wreck institutions, rewrite laws and processes, and even demand the suppression of objective facts for the sake of their politics of grievance. Even language itself must be forcibly changed. A vivid example of this was seen recently when an LGBTQ activist demanded the removal of a billboard that featured nothing but the dictionary definition of “woman”. This was deemed a “hate campaign” and “transphobic”.

The strategies, techniques, theories, and continuous psychological projection is nearly indistinguishable from those employed by fascists in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In the name of justice they do injustice. They claim to be guardians of victims yet they victimise and terrorise their opponents. Their aim is also the same as those of classical fascists. True, they are not trying to install a fascist government, but they are certainly trying to obtain social power through a framework advocating an inversion of community values. Like the fascists of the past, they seek to force others to submit to the rules they have decided to impose.

The intellectual groundwork behind this movement is a recipe for the decline of democracy and an ever-expanding attack on Christianity. Which brings us back to the question in the title. Could Hitler get published in the modern academy? Most assuredly he could. In fact, thanks to Lindsey, Boghossian and Pluckrose, he already has.

What are the long-term implications for a society in which Hitler’s politics of grievance are indistinguishable from other scholarship within their highest institutions of learning?

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days….evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” (2 Timothy 3:1, 3:13)

So wrote St. Paul to Timothy regarding the trajectory of human society.

Notice that St. Paul does not write about wars and explosive catastrophes. These epic events are so beloved by the charismatics who see signs of doom in their morning cornflakes, but they are not mentioned here. Indeed, the scripture writers show remarkable disinterest in providing us with a historical timeline of events regarding what will happen in the future. The apostles are not in the business of equipping us to be professional fortune-tellers.

This has not stopped many people – including good and faithful Christians – looking for current events in the word of God. Nuclear Armageddons, world wars, missile strikes by Iran, and imminent biological threats have each, at different times, been “unearthed” in the scriptures. Some claim that certain symbols in the Book of Daniel or The Revelation speak of Hitler. Or the Pope. Or the President of the United States.

This has always been a temptation for Christians. For example, in 14th century Europe amidst the ravages of the Black Death that killed approximately half of the continent’s population, Christians “discovered” that the scriptures predicted disease and the end of the world in their times. “It must be so,” they reasoned, “for if the horsemen of the apocalypse do not refer to times like ours, then what could they possibly refer to?” The same questions have been asked whenever great evil befalls the human race.

But this is not the sort of information the scriptures offer us about the Last Days. We may be thankful God does not paint out the future for us in lurid journalistic detail, for who could bear the weight of it?

Yet this does not mean the Bible offers us no information at all. In this letter, St. Paul provides us with extremely valuable information. But observe where the apostle’s focus lies; take careful note of what is important in the estimation of the apostle.

For St. Paul is chiefly interested in the moral dimension of the Last Days. If you want to know how close the Lord is, says St. Paul, look at the moral fabric around you and compare it to what has gone before, both in degree and intensity. Look at sin’s prevalence and acceptance. To paraphrase Christopher Wren, “if you want to see a monument that shows us how close we are to the end of days, then look around you”.

For it is precisely the moral context of any age or epoch that shows us mankind’s alienation from God and our proximity to Christ’s return.

Some have argued that St. Paul must be describing all time since Christ’s ascension. They argue this on the basis that all of these sins have always been common to mankind in every era. You could always find greedy people. Or disobedient children.

But the Apostle’s own writing here would tend to suggest he was thinking of a definite future point. He clearly says that these terrible times will come. He does not say that terrible times have already come – even against the backdrop of bloody assassinations of emperors in Rome and the deplorable morality of a pagan people. Rather he says terrible times will come and they will come just prior to the Lord’s return.

What will make the last days terrible? St. Paul answers, “The moral quality of the people”.

During the Last Days we will see sins that are not merely on the charts, but are so extreme, so intense, so common that they will exceed the charts of human depravity. St. Paul writes about people loving money and lacking self-control. Being lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. He speaks of rebellion against parents and ingratitude. He writes about men being conceited and brutal. He paints a compendium of immorality. St. Paul pictures a society in shocking decay, where life becomes precarious, evil becomes the main survival strategy, and goodness carries a great personal cost.

Moral evil, St. Paul points out, will intensify as human society endures. Each succeeding generation will outdo its predecessor in unbelief and in sin.

Thus, what constituted a love of money in the early 1900’s – for example, the Roaring Twenties and the tragic greed for shares that ruined countless lives – may change in form. It may be expressed differently on the surface. Yet the underlying love of money continues and will become all the more severe as time goes on.

If the Global Financial Crisis proved anything it was the existence of epic greed on a scale never witnessed before in human history. Moreover, this was not just limited to a few wealthy fat cats. Large masses of people were so indebted nothing they had was really theirs. And still the lesson has not been learned! Already, so soon after the alleged “recovery,” once again we see large masses of people up to their neck in debt.

In Australia, the ME Bank issues a bi-annual report on the condition of Australian households. It surveys 1,500 households regarding income, expenditure, saving, and financial stress. The most recent findings show that no moral wisdom has been gained from the global financial downturn. It shows that people no longer even abide by common proverbial wisdom and “save for a rainy day”. Instead, people live close to disaster and ruin. So close, indeed, that it would terrify our frugal forebears:

The report showed that households’ confidence to raise money for an emergency dropped three points below the average since the survey began, and fewer households reported they are saving. The estimated amount that Australians are saving each month decreased by just over 10% during the first half of 2018.

More Australians are also overspending – households who ‘typically spend all of their income and more’ increased 3 points to 11% during the six months to June.

“Clearly, this is a potential tipping point. At the moment, Australians generally can dip into their savings to get by. However, some households may get to a point where there’s no more savings to draw from. Currently, around a quarter of Australian households have less than $1000 in cash savings,” Oughton said.

This is not just an Australian phenomenon. This year it was reported in The Independent that a quarter of British adults have no savings at all:

…the poll of 2,620 respondents in the UK found more than a tenth of the population admit to being ‘terrible’ with money.

Also concerning is the fact one in 10 admitted they typically spend more than they earn.

And 28 per cent sometimes go over budget.

Additionally, the study also found one in 10 adults over the age of 55 don’t have a penny put away for their future – compared to 38 per cent of 25 to 34 year-olds who are already saving.

Of course there are cases where people experience financial disaster due to no fault of their own. Such people are deserving of compassion and support.

But one of the leaders of the financial group that commissioned the report could not help but point to the self-inflicted nature of the situation. It is not that many of these Britons do not earn money. It is simply that they are unable to control themselves.

They cannot govern their own impulses. And so they spend.

“But our results found people are more prone to splurging money on things they don’t need, rather than saving it and it’s this that has the greatest impact.”

…

And more than one in 10 admit they often spend their money as soon as they get it.

In the last month, fifteen per cent of respondents have spent money on cigarettes, and 58 per cent have bought chocolate or sweets.

Four in 10 have splashed the cash on a takeaway, with 45 per cent opting for one at least once a month.

Lovers of money are frequently impoverished.

But self-control is evaporating right across the landscape of human experience, not just in the realm of money. St. Paul taught us that as we approach the last days we should expect to see an explosion in the number of people who are unable to control themselves. We should expect to observe a general loss in the ability of people to restrain their appetites; to discipline their desires; to be governed by the mind and not by transient emotions and lusts.

To an unprecedented degree we see this very problem emerging at a galloping pace in Western culture. Self-control is fast diminishing.

A hundred years ago people would have associated drunkenness and violence with a lack of self-control. But a lack of self-control was much less of an issue in a society that used corporal and capital punishments; had high expectations of personal behaviour; and demanded people take full responsibility for their actions. Nobody thought to excuse their bad behaviour on the grounds of a difficult upbringing, or one’s parents, or society at large. Nobody would have taken it seriously. Moreover, overall there were far fewer opportunities for people to truly lose control of themselves. Western society still had a Christian backbone and regarded personal morality as a public matter.

Yes, there were infamous Victorian brothels or gin joints that offered people some scope for their sinful impulses. Morphine addiction might have been enjoyed by wealthier men – as Sherlock Holmes was famously portrayed as using by Arthur Conan Doyle. A person might be able to be violent in the family home and rule it like a malignant tyrant. But the censure of polite society was heavy. Drunks were reviled. Wife-beaters were held in contempt. And sexual impurity was so scandalous it could ruin career and reputation (not to mention body and mind should one contract a sexually transmitted disease).

All such intemperance was held to be shameful and was denounced by top-hatted leaders as evident evils.

But as society has grown more affluent it has also grown more lax in the policing of morality. Opportunities for people to behave without inhibition continue to expand, just as St. Paul predicted. Sin has intensified because it has gained traction, popularity, and social approval. Sin is also aided by technology. Technology can be a great blessing. Discoveries and inventions of all kinds have been ordained by the grace of God so that the human race can expand and truly “fill the earth”. Unfortunately, in the hands of sinful men and women, technology also provides the means for the promotion of sin.

One realm in which we see this vividly is in modern entertainment.

New forms of entertainment now focus deliberately and calculatedly on tacky, sleazy, and childish aspects of uninhibited conduct. Their much-ballyhooed “stars” are encouraged to be aggressive, dirty mouthed, oddball, and blatantly sexualised. Reality television shows like Love Island even try to give promiscuity a certain glamour. Its contestants consist of scantily clad men and women who are thrown together into intimate situations, with the crackle of sexual expectation constantly underpinning conversations, choices, and behaviour.

Love Island displays camera footage of contestants in bed together. Contrary to all notions of moral purity, unmarried contestants sleep together in the same bed. They are filmed as they engage in intimate caressing and stroking. In recent episode a male contestant was shown running his hands over a female contestant’s buttocks, hips and body as they lay in bed together. A day later, the female contestant who had been fondled told the camera team that she needed time to warm up and therefore “nothing risky happened”. She added that the male contestant she was in bed with “was keen”, as if this were a striking flash of insight.

Unmarried sex is portrayed as normal and exciting across entertainment platforms. In movies, television shows, and video games audiences are seldom shown examples of noble self-restraint and honourable conduct because virtue is not the goal. It certainly is not the goal of reality television. This is because moral conduct is insufferably boring to a society that neither fears God nor cares about their personal accountability before him on the Day of Judgement.

God has promised that his wrath is upon the sexually immoral. Yet this is a trivial matter to most people in the Western world who have been successfully deceived into thinking that there is no God (or if there is, he is a liberal, jovial Santa Claus-type figure who will never punish and never condemn). Most people now believe that we are not created beings. They ascribe human beings some place in the world of animals. This downgrade in human dignity supposedly permits behaviour that even the beasts do not engage in. Most of Western society now thinks there is no absolute moral law that is binding on the human conscience. They laugh at the Final Judgement.

It is hard to believe that it was only a hundred and twenty years ago, in 1896, that the first on-screen kiss was filmed and shown as a Vitascope movie aptly titled The Kiss. This short movie, less than 30 seconds long, simply showed a middle-aged man and woman kissing each other. Despite its tame content by 21st century standards, the film resulted in moral disgust both from the media and from churches. Several years later, another short kissing film was actually censored by theatres.

A hundred and twenty years later the moral quality of entertainment has plummeted to depths the average person could not ever have imagined in the 1890’s. Film now includes nude sex scenes of all kinds; full frontal nakedness; casual sexualised language; not to mention gratuitous violence in which human beings are bloodily hacked apart for horrific effect; and a fascination with dark spirits, demonic activity, and re-animated corpses.

Yet, it will not end here, of course. The development of 3D virtual reality systems opens new frontiers. Entertainment system builders are scrambling over themselves to combine sex with new technology.

For those who do not know virtual reality technology involves a user wearing a headset that contains high-definition projectors or screens that can simulate an alternative world. The user can interact with the simulation to different degrees as he turns his head, or motions with his hands, or walks around. The technology is designed to simulate an “alternative reality” to an extent that traditional screens cannot.

Phone or television screens show images in a defined frame. The frame is the screen itself. A television screen, for example, usually has a black plastic border around it. A mobile phone screen is edged by the shell of the phone casing. In both cases, the screen has a measurable surface; a beginning and an end. These sorts of screens exist within a real environment. For example, the family television in a living room shares the environment with furnishings, ornaments, windows, floors, and people. With little effort, you can lift your eyes from the moving images on the screen and look at something that is real.

Virtual reality headsets, on the other hand, are meant to be fully immersive. They are designed to block out as much of the real environment as possible and replace it with a simulation that is as realistic as possible. The illusion is heightened by allowing the user to interact with the simulated world; by giving him some degree of control over what he sees. The aim is to create a bubble of fantasy that approximates to real life.

An article published in September 2017 in Asia Times documents the eagerness with which sexual content is now combined with new entertainment products:

“Every time a new technology is introduced into the market, adult content always tends to be the new technology’s earliest and most eager adopters,” Hahn said. “This happened in the past [with technologies] like VHS, DVD and Blu-ray, and is now happening on VR.”

According to Google trending analysis, people search for VR porn far more than for VR games and sports. Currently, around 38% of VR headsets are purchased by people who want to enjoy adult content, while 3% of all VR users pay an average of US$35 for adult content.

By 2025, the VR adult-entertainment business will be worth an estimated $1 billion, third-largest in the VR sector after video games ($1.4 billion) and content related to America’s National Football League ($1.23 billion), Hahn said.

The effort and energy that is now being expended to expand the boundaries of sexual sin is staggering. The full pornography experience includes virtual reality headsets, gadgets that produce scents, and devices that are attached to the genitals. It is a grotesque technological monster that aims to give a person the nearest approximation of sexual activity without actually involving another person:

To create lifelike intimate sexual experiences in the virtual world requires a combination of visual, sensual and intellectual components, which is made possible with gadgets such as VR headsets, scents emitted from the device, and synched vibration of intimate parts.

“To fully gear up for VR sex now requires at least US$10,000. That’s a very expensive [sexual experience],” Hahn said.

Michelle Flynn, director and owner of Lightsouthern Cinema, who has more than 10 years of experience in the adult-entertainment industry, expressed excitement at the new technology.

“VR porn provides more realistic experiences and greater immersion,” Flynn said. “Instead of being a spectator, you become a participant. It is so immersive that when the performer leans into the camera when you are watching, you move your head back too.”

What moral “progress” has been wrought by the entertainment industry since the Vitascope kissing film of 1896!

Another measurable demonstration of St. Paul’s principle is seen in the way people eat.

Food requires self-control. This is necessary both in the selection of food that is eaten and in the actual amount consumed. In the past, people could seldom overeat. They could indulge only at certain points in time which were almost always tied to a communal celebration. Harvest festivals, religious days, or wedding ceremonies would be observed with feasts and banqueting. Sometimes these could continue for many days. Yet, outside of these times, people’s eating was limited by several unavoidable forces that acted as restraints.

The first was the imperative to perform daily manual work which was often time-consuming. The second force was the natural limitations on food production and storage in pre-industrial societies that made economy a necessary virtue for survival. In other words, a person could not regularly overeat because too much of their time was spent in work, and food was rationed so that it lasted for the period between harvests.

In the modern Western world no such limits exist anymore and the result has been an explosion in sloth, obesity, and people who destroy their own health with food. Neither is such a lack of self-restraint isolated only to Western nations. Sin is, after all, universal. And if the West has a cultural backbone of Christian virtue, other historically non-Christian nations have no such heritage and are even less resistant to sin.

Thus, food-related diseases are rapidly appearing in the Third World. There are obesity epidemics occurring in places traditionally associated with hunger, like India. In fact, there is now a 5% morbid obesity rate in India and it is rapidly galloping upward. In a country of nearly a billion people, this translates to fifty million overweight people with millions more growing obese by the year. But South Africa leaves them in the shade. In 2015, around 65% of its population were obese.

It was relatively difficult for most people to be obese a hundred years ago, and because of this historical fact, obesity is often explained away as a government problem, or the effect of technological development, or as a by-product of the industrialisation of labour. Like many human problems, obesity is seldom examined as a moral problem. Seldom is obesity even seen to have a moral dimension – for that would require personal responsibility – even though our eating is unquestionably governed by moral choices.

Television shows like TLC’s My 600 lb Life reveals the morality behind eating. It documents the lives of people who have reached gargantuan proportions. These people never deny themselves food. They consume far more than is necessary. In all cases, they will easily eat in one sitting as much food as a family of six might comfortably share between them. Moreover, as the television series investigates their lives, their personalities come to the forefront. Even under the scrutiny of the cameras, what is often revealed is selfishness, laziness, self-pity, and a habit of bullying and blaming others. One of the ways in which these ugly moral lapses work their way out is through gluttony.

Some of these people reach the point of immobility before they decide to change. The solution they hit upon is surgery. Of course, the assumption behind weight-loss surgery is an absence of self-control for the rest of a person’s life. Since these people cannot control themselves, an artificial constraint must be placed upon them by literally cutting away their stomach or using gastric bands to squeeze it.

The latest development in the loss of self-control is the emergence of movements that seek to redefine what is healthy. Like other forms of identity politics, the basis for doing this is not empirical science but an ideological fantasy.

The “body positivity” or “size acceptance” movement is now at the forefront of enabling people to delude themselves that they can be “healthy at any size”. This is a movement that quite openly aims to overturn the concept that slender bodies are beautiful, and it particularly attacks the idea that some people are more beautiful than others. “Every human body deserves to be celebrated regardless of size,” they say. Thus, fat people should be able to wear what they like. There should be fashion models of different degrees of obesity. Fat people should “feel comfortable in their own skin”. You can have “beauty at any size”. These are the keystone slogans.

The body positivity movement has very quickly morphed itself into a victim group. This demonstrates something of the psychology of identity politics and the complete intellectual anaemia of Western culture that such a thing could be taken seriously. In a world that still knows starvation, the absurdity of overweight people claiming to be victims, or the risible notion that someone is “brave” for being overweight and wearing a bikini in public, demonstrates how bottomless is the pit of irrationality.

Despite the foolishness of their assertions the body positivity movement has learned the lessons of identity politics very well. It understands how to pull the levers of manipulation and the importance of enlisting the liberal media to their cause. Almost lock, stock and barrel, it has copied its strategy from other successful identity movements. This is why it is experiencing unqualified support in the liberal media. It can also command an army of outrage like other identity groups. One need only consider the fury over Netflix’s new series Insatiable to see this in action.

Body positivity advocates have dressed themselves in the garb of oppression. They claim to have been bullied at school for their weight thus demonstrating the systemic discrimination against fat people, no different from the “hate” experienced by other victim groups. They point to slender models in advertising and claim this is dangerous. It is dangerous, they say, because it teaches young women to starve themselves and hate their own bodies. “This kind of advertising,” they assert without evidence, “is harming young women. It is telling every teenage girl, ‘You are not good enough’.”

The body positivity movement has invented terms like “body shaming” or “fat shaming”, which are roughly congruent with terms like “victim shaming”. These terms are so construed as to encompass any criticism of obesity or any negative opinion whatsoever about a person’s appearance. This extends even to common and logical associations such as the relationship between obesity and inactivity.

Activists in this movement, many of whom are obese women, will appear on cameras and insist that obesity is merely the normal state of their particular body. They will often claim that they perform extensive physical activity and eat healthily – as was the case of one advocate who weighed over 300 pounds and visibly struggled to fit into the studio chairs. These claims are flatly biologically impossible. Nobody who eats a mostly vegetarian diet and performs extensive daily physical exercise would possibly be able to approach 140 kilograms. Yet the obvious lie – so clearly contradictory of objective reality – is seldom allowed to be challenged without shrieks of “insensitivity” and “body shaming”.

Other key concepts in the movement include “structural discrimination”. This relates to the alleged oppression inherent in an environment that is not designed for people of their girth. For example, seats in an aircraft are frequently too small for overweight people. Doorways may be too narrow. Aisles in some stores may not be navigated comfortably by mobility scooters. Rides in amusement parks may exclude people over a weight category. Some surfaces may crack or break when walked upon.

None of this is interpreted as a sign that a person has become so overweight that they have exceeded the spectrum of sizes for which the built environment was designed. Rather it is interpreted as a subtle form of discrimination. Builders, designers, architects, and engineers are constructing the world for the slender and thereby marginalising and excluding the obese. This is presented as being similar to the now infamous “microaggressions” that have become sources of tremendous concern to college students.

The ultimate aim for the body positivity movement to enrol these concepts into the pantheon of public virtue. They want to force the world to accommodate them. Aircraft will need to provide them with broader seats for the same price of an airfare as someone who might be given a smaller seat. Stores should be mobility scooter friendly. All clothing lines should come in gargantuan sizes. And “body shaming” should become so politically incorrect and dangerous that eventually it is regarded as “sackable” evil. Some progress has already been made toward the goal with the banning of the “Are you beach body ready?” advertisements in the London Underground. These advertisements showed a fit woman and were decried as unrealistic and exclusionary.

Taken to its logical extension – and given the ever-expanding waistlines of citizens in the Western world – it will eventually become very difficult for any health advice about obesity to be issued to people.

If there is one thing that definitively marks Western culture in the last few decades – and will continue to mark Western culture into the foreseeable future – it is the development of sophisticated frameworks to deflect personal responsibility for the choices and problems in one’s life upon others. A smoker, for example, will blame tobacco companies for their cancer. Or the government, because it once allowed tobacconists to advertise their products. The liberal press will try to exculpate the poor for quite literally burning up their precious money on cigarettes. And now a whole movement has come into being that not only celebrates overweight people under the guise of “acceptance”, but actually encourages obesity by trying to suppress inconvenient information or bullying people into silence who would appeal to the verdict of medical science.

St. Paul foresaw this many centuries ago. If he were to visit us in the 21st century, none of this would have surprised him, and it should not surprise us that this sort of delusion will continue to increase. Western society is bound to get sicker, fatter, more economically precarious, more sexualised, more obsessed with pornography, more perverted, and ever more thoroughly riddled with other forms of evil.

St. Paul’s warning to Timothy enables us to make predictions about the direction society is heading. Of course, the Lord can – and frequently has – radically altered the course of history to fulfil his plans. Nothing of the future can be known for certain, other than what God himself has chosen to reveal to us. And, as human creatures, we lack our God’s perfect omniscience and must never fancy ourselves wiser than our Maker. Yet thanks to his word, we are able to see something of the future unfolding before us.

As the days grow darker and immorality and vice more omnipresent, we can find our consolation in the certainty that the Lord’s return is growing closer. God will not allow the darkness to long envelope the world, for he is a God of light and justice. It is an exciting thought that our Lord may descend upon the clouds in the very near future.

“The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” (Romans 13:11)

“Man is born to trouble,” said Eliphaz to Job, “as surely as the sparks fly upward.”

This is not a truth that we always want to acknowledge. When the sun is shining and life is good we hope that it will never end. We always want good times to roll on forever. Any reminder that trouble might come our way is hit out of field by the human psyche with all the force of a top baseball player.

But God’s word tells us about reality. It gives us the true shape of life so that we do not live under a cloud of the world’s lies. The Bible corrects our nearsightedness. Scripture will not permit us to be victims of the devil. Thus, God in his majestic truthfulness testifies that trouble is an inescapable part of life for a Christian. St. Paul goes so far as to say that no true Christian will live a trouble-free life on this earth.

This does not mean that every Christian’s troubles will be the same. Some may face extreme situations like martyrdom and exile from their homes (like the Christians in ISIS occupied territory). Others may simply face the daily weariness of work and family, and the mental struggle of living in an ungodly world.

There is, after all, a deep existential tension of being a Christian in the 21st century. There must be. There should be. Nobody can love the world, writes St. John, and love God at the same time (1 John 2:15). Friendship with the world, says St. James, is enmity with God (James 4:4). Given this, Christians can feel like they belong to a shrinking number of the sane. The irreverence and ungodliness around us can torment the mind and soul just as the things Lot saw in Sodom caused him great distress (2 Peter 2:7).

Sometimes Christians experiences trouble as the by-product of the sinful nature. Even as redeemed people, we can make misjudgements, be rash, and come to wrong-headed conclusions about things. We can make bad decisions. There are a legion of examples.

Pastor Tim Conway once related the story of a friend. This young man married a woman who was a local beauty pageant winner. His godly friends counselled him against the match. They could see her true character but like many eager young people, he saw only the surface. Shortly after the marriage the young man discovered his bride was contentious, ill-tempered, and disloyal. She withheld herself from him sexually, had flirtations with his friends, and eventually ran away with one of his buddies never to return.

Christians can (and do) make errors of judgement. We do not always faithfully observe the teaching of scripture, wisdom and the Church. Even Christians can make choices that plunge them into years – perhaps a lifetime – of trouble. No wonder the scriptures tell us to consult the words of the Lord frequently. Meditate on God’s law day and night, writes the psalmist (Psalm 1:2). Joshua commands the people to not only think on God’s word, but to have it continually on their lips (Joshua 1:8).

It is supreme wisdom to adapt our behaviour to God’s will. To walk circumspectly and thoughtfully. For this will keep us from falling into sin. It will prevent us from piercing ourselves with many needless sorrows.

But sometimes we do not stray from the narrow way of Jesus. At times our hearts are overflowing with praise to the King. Our fellowship with God in prayer can be so rich it is as though we walk in the perfumed gardens of Eden with the Lord. At times Jesus can draw us so near to the extent we can almost wonder if we are about to enter heaven. At such times, God’s holiness falls on the heart, we long for more and more righteousness, and his word is life to us.

And then trouble can come.

This is a paradox indeed! Trouble can come when we believe ourselves to be following most closely on the heels of the Master. This has been the discovery of many godly men and women throughout the ages. They often built the Kingdom of God under the weight of trouble. Amy Carmichael, the Irish missionary who spent fifty-five years in India saving girls from temple prostitution, was bedridden in her latter years. Why did such trouble come to such a powerful missionary for the Lord?

We can wonder about this. Why do difficulties sometimes come when the heart burns for the Lord and for the fulfilment of his righteousness? This is a mystery, but there is comfort from the Lord. For though a man is born to trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward, God is the Saviour and Father of all who believe.

TROUBLE, NOT SUFFERING

Notice that I avoid the word “suffering”. In the modern world the word “suffering” is an impaired word. For a start it is commonly linked to ill-health. “Poor Mrs Oliphant,” we say, “she suffers from arthritis.”

Under such repeated usage dinned into our ears, we come to associate suffering with a continuous state usually afflicting the body. This raises the high bar on what constitutes “suffering”. People can mistakenly conclude that unless you have Big Bad Stuff going on in your life it is not suffering. The word tends to excludes many painful human experiences. “Oh, you are getting harassed at work? That doesn’t sound so bad. The rest of your life is OK. Can you really call it suffering?”

The word “suffering” also evokes fear. It conjures up terrifying visions. It excites painful anxiety. “What kind of suffering am I to endure?” we may fret, “What is going to happen to me?

Such anxiety may be difficult to avoid but it is wrong. It is evident that by God’s grace most Christians do not experience the worst of life. Some brave Christians (whose reward in heaven is undoubtedly very great) do indeed undergo a baptism of fire and their lives are admittedly very difficult. But such Christians are always compensated with abundant joy and grace so that like St. Paul they are enabled to sing even while in the stocks of prison.

Nonetheless, this kind of deep hardship is not a general rule. It does not seem to be God’s intention that his Christian people be kicked to the curb. In fact, God richly blesses his children with many joys both temporal and spiritual. His Church – as a rule – does not go about in ceaseless mourning. God has made a time for tears but also a time for laughter, and for most Christians, there is indeed more laughter than tears.

Thus it is neither healthy nor wise to meditate on the difficulties of others. Neither should we get caught up in the stories of the disgruntled who seem angry at God for their pain. It is not for us to judge the invisible spiritual forces or God’s mysterious purposes. Neither is it up to us to work out all the details of someone else’s life. It is not our place to judge the Judge of All the Earth. A speculative mind on the issue of trouble is polluting.

God has set before us lives to ponder in scripture. These people were no strangers to trouble. But the lives he offers to us to consider are ultimately triumphant ones. All of them. That should be the focus. For as Dr. Martyn-Lloyd Jones once preached, “Some Christians seem to think that God wants them for the same reason the devil does: to torment them.” Such thinking always arises from error and it produces a calumny against God. God is a Father to his people. That is a solid, unassailable truth.

Thus the word “trouble” is better. For a start it is more expansive. It covers a lot more ground and includes the full panoply of Christian struggle. From the minor to the major.

FATHERLY COMFORT

The Letter to the Hebrews contains comfort for anyone who experiences trouble.

It comforts in three ways. Firstly, by reassuring readers that Jesus is a faithful and compassionate high priest whose heavenly intercession is truly efficacious. Secondly, the letter gives a long list of people who were able to face many difficulties through their faith in God. Faith is not just an esoteric feeling, the letter tells us, it takes concrete forms. The letter shows us how to have faith. Thirdly, the letter provides us with answers. It teaches us that our troubles should be regarded as God’s fatherly dealing with us.

There is far too much to mention all at once. But reading this letter prayerfully, with special attention to Hebrews 11 and 12, will surely offer substantial joy, comfort and strength. Here are some thoughts.

The chapter opens with the following statement:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. (Hebrews 11:3)

This truth comes first because it is the foundation of peace in the turbulence of the storm. If we do not believe that God created all things then we do not have the sort of faith that can receive God’s comfort.

It is not sufficient to simply “believe” in God’s creative acts on an intellectual or mental level. We are surrounded by talk of evolution and the Big Bang. The unbelieving world operates on the basis of this grand deceit and pummels the Christian relentlessly. Unbelief is so ubiquitous that it can chip away – slowly at first – at the Christian’s certainty. Evolution and Big Bang cosmology can quite easily leak into the mind of the Christian so that he plays a double-game. One the one hand he can persuade himself that he believes in creation, while in his heart he doubts and secretly thinks these theories have validity.

A conviction of creation must be deeply internalised so that we come to see that Christ stands behind every painted surface in the universe; whether the rise and fall of a leaf, or the roll of thunder, the rays of sunlight. We must know that Jesus governs all creation.

If this is our faith, it transforms into a source of comfort. It is a great encouragement to know that we can pray to the King of Creation, a King who governs not merely a nation, but all existence. This is the King who sculptured the planets and ignited the stars. If he can do that which is very great, can he not help us in our times of trouble? Can he not perform miracles of grace in our lives? Most assuredly, he can.

The writer goes on to provide a long list of saints who accomplished things by faith. Many of these saints – in fact, all of them – endured struggles of many kinds. But by faith in the Living God, they not only endured, but triumphed over them.

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. (Hebrews 11:8).

Here the writer emphasises faith in God as we plunge into the unknown. Times of trouble can be frightening precisely because often we do not know what is going to happen. The unknown can make our trouble seem unbearable. Will I be ruined? Will I be outcast? Will I be killed? Will I lose my faith?

The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that Abraham also was sent on a journey into the unknown. He left behind all that was familiar and safe. He did not know where he was going. He journeyed in the dark but he had the faith to believe God would look after him. And God led him safely all the years of his wandering.

The writer goes on:

And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

By faith, Abraham and Sarah did the impossible. They produced a child when Abraham was 99 years old and Sarah’s barren womb was unquestionably dead. No child had been conceived within her for 90 years. Her past history with childbearing – that is to say, zero children – could have left her with little hope for the remaining years of her life.

For indeed the years had made their mark on the pair. No doubt both were grey-headed and growing gaunt and feeble. They had been allowed by God to age to the point where they were past all possibility of reproduction. Physiologically it was impossible. Barrenness had been a source of trouble and grief in their lives. And God now promised to relieve them at the point where it seemed they had missed the boat.

Yet, hoping against all hope, and believing against all belief, they had faith in the promises of God. God used the material before him. He caused Abraham to desire his wife; and he caused life to flare into existence inside Sarah. After such a long wait, she experienced the joy of being a mother.

In times of trouble; in times of sadness, loneliness and grief we can wonder whether God will ever come for us. Will joy ever lighten our way again? We may sometimes patiently wait and pray for a long time. But faith is always rewarded in God’s economy. And the longer we wait, the greater the reward tends to be. This should serve as a great inspiration to cling to the promises of God in his word. To take him at his word in faith. To keep praying, to keep doing good, to keep plodding heavenward. It is a Christian cliche, of sorts, but it is nonetheless moving: keep on keeping on.

In the 12th chapter, the writer tells us:

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.

Sometimes Christians experience trouble due to God’s corrective discipline in our lives. The writer tells us that this discipline is for our good. It is intended to make us more holy and thus more ready for our meeting with the King at the end of the world.

When God lands blows upon his children in the form of troubles, he does so out of fatherly concern for their soul. Perhaps we are starting to flirt with spiritual danger. Perhaps we are growing cold or arrogant. Perhaps we are hardhearted and need the carapace of self-regard cracked apart. Perhaps we have sinned (or are sinning) and need to be yanked back onto the path of Jesus.

Whatever the case – even if sometimes we may not know the reason for it at all – this corrective discipline, the writer assures us, produces peace and righteousness when it is finally over. Correction and discipline does not feel pleasant for the moment. It is painful and grievous. We do not like it. But the results make it well worthwhile. It leads to the Christian surrendering bad attitudes, habits or desires and learning to love and follow Christ more wholeheartedly. It leads to a life that is more abundant. A life that is brimming with Jesus. A life that is more flourishing like the tree planted by a spring, with its branches that grow over the wall heavy with fruit (Genesis 49:22). It leads to a life that is more joyful, more complete, more rich, more free, and more godly.

It leads to a life that is more full of Jesus; He who is the source of all goodness, joy, laughter, peace, and righteousness. He who is the light of the world.

Once more sexual scandal rocks the Roman Catholic Church. But underneath the surface a vicious civil war is being fought in a deeply divided church. Allegations of cover-up are the daggers. And Pope Francis faces a political assassination.

The Roman Catholic Church has fallen upon hard times of late.

Across the world, sexual scandals are exploding like ACME dynamite in a Looney Tunes skit. Each one rocks the church to the core.

Just in this year alone there have been scandals in Chile, Australia, Pennsylvania, Guam, and Honduras. There are dozens of victims – if not hundreds – going back over decades. Investigators have identified hundreds of perpetrators, which now include some of the highest ranked clergy in the world: bishops and cardinals. Some of these have been convicted in secular courts. A cardinal awaits sentencing in Australia.

And it is not only children who have suffered from clerical abuse, but also seminarians. These young men, some of them scarcely more than teenagers when they began their priestly training, have been abused by men who claimed to be their shepherds. They were harassed, groomed, and coerced into sexual relationships with clergy who were old enough to be their uncles. It has been revealed that rampant homosexuality is virtually the norm in some seminaries around the world.

In July of this year, Lifesite Newsreported the claims of seminarians in Honduras. They complained:

“We are living and experiencing a time of tension in our house because of gravely immoral situations, above all of an active homosexuality inside the seminary that has been a taboo all this time,” continued the young men’s letter, “and by covering up and penalizing this situation the problem has grown in strength, turning into, as one priest said not so long ago, an ‘epidemic in the seminary.”

An article published by the National Catholic Register, also in July, made the following claim:

In a letter written to the seminary’s formators that was subsequently circulated in June to the country’s Catholic bishops, the seminarians asserted “irrefutable evidence” exists that a homosexual network pervades the institution and is being protected by its rector.

The article goes onto allege that high-placed clergymen had sexual relationships with young seminarians. This is not only a breach of Roman Catholic doctrinal teaching on sexuality and a violation of the vows of celibacy that priests are meant to take in the sight of God, but surely a clear instance of more powerful individuals taking advantage of inexperienced and relatively less powerful young men:

Similar to the charges surrounding Cardinal McCarrick, who reportedly engaged in a long-standing practice of pressuring seminarians into sexual activity with him while he was serving as bishop in two New Jersey dioceses during the 1980s and 1990s, Auxiliary Bishop Jose Juan Pineda Fasquelle of Tegucigalpa has been accused of engaging in homosexual interactions with Tegucigulpa seminarians.

And, just as the revelations regarding Cardinal McCarrick have provoked troubling questions about what his brother U.S. bishops and the Vatican knew about his interactions with seminarians and about why nothing was disclosed publicly for so long, the Honduran allegations call into question the actions of Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa.

While Cardinal Maradiaga — a key confidante of Pope Francis who is coordinator of the “C9” group of cardinals advising him on reforming Church governance and the Roman Curia — is not himself the subject of allegations of sexual misconduct, he is now under fire for appearing to have disregarded a wealth of evidence of homosexual misconduct by Bishop Pineda, whose resignation as auxiliary bishop was accepted by Pope Francis July 20.

The Honduran seminarians’ letter reportedly was not met with praise for having come forward in June; Cardinal Maradiaga instead accused the seminarians of being “gossipers” who wish to portray their fellow seminarians in a bad light, according to sources in Honduras.

The same article reports allegations that more than half of the seminarians in the diocese are homosexuals – something that could never be known if these men were celibate.

These are not victimless sins. This is evil that damages people’s lives forever. Sexual abuse and harassment inflicts terrible wounds on people’s souls and mangles their capacity for trust and faith. Nothing could be more aptly described as the work of Satan than the sexual abuse of children and the sexual coercion of young people since it fundamentally destroys and impairs their human flourishing.

It is not only the horror of the sexual perversion itself that is nauseating. It is also the rank hypocrisy.

The perpetrators and their abettors are the same men who claim for themselves some kind of apostolic authority, and therefore some kind of moral privilege. They even dare to take unto themselves the title alter Christus – that is, “another Christ”. Could there be anything that better qualifies as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? When a man preys upon the vulnerable like Satan, and at the same time to pretends to be “another Christ”, he has reached a degree of hypocrisy never approached even by the Pharisees.

St. Jude tells us that such men are: “…wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.” These words surely affix themselves to these grotesque moral and religious mutants. The text also comforts the Christian with the reminder that judgement will most assuredly occur.

THE ASSASSIN’S BLADE

The conclusion is inescapable. Dark cesspits have formed within the Catholic organisation. They steam and bubble and release the fetid odours of sin which until now have remained out of the public eye due to an active effort of concealment.

But a great exposure is taking place. This is not just driven by the findings of courts. It is also being driven by high-ranking clerics effectively spilling their guts to the media. They have sought to “out” each other. They have targeted each other with accusations. They have stamped question marks over each other’s reputation.

It is a vicious political bloodletting that in a previous age would have resulted in piles of bodies, unceremoniously tossed into graves, jewelled daggers firmly inserted into backs.

It is now transparently clear that the Catholic hierarchy is at war with itself. Cardinals are taking potshots at each other. Bishops and priests are weighing in. Both traditionalists and liberals within the church have tried to cast the blame for cover-up and deception upon the other camp. Herein we see the principle that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. Both sides are using it to damn the other.

Some clergy are jockeying for position. They sense that fresh vacancies will soon be open in the upper ranks when senior clerics are purged. Others have battened down the hatches in the hope that the storm will pass and their careers will be unaffected. Still others are spinning their wheels so fast to rewrite history that they have nearly started a small tornado.

Much of the heat has arisen due a former Apostolic Nuncio by the name of Carlo Maria Viganò. A few weeks ago, Viganò released a lengthy testimony that named prominent and powerful clergy who, Viganò claims, knew of the deplorable behaviour of Cardinal McCarrick but did nothing to stop him.

Most damning of all Viganò has claimed that Pope Francis was told about McCarrick as far back as 2013, and singularly failed to take action. The letter seethes with a spirit of moral retribution. If you want people to resign for their failures, Viganò says, then begin with yourself! Viganò seems to suggest that if Pope Francis wants heads from among the top then he will most certainly get heads: and one of the first to roll will be his own.

It is the first time in living memory that any highly-placed member of the hierarchy has publicly denounced the head of the pyramid: the pope himself. The Roman Catholic Church operates under a strict code of secrecy and silence, which Father Raymond de Souza outlined in the Catholic Herald just a few days ago:

Whatever the truth or falsity of the claims made by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in his “testimony” calling for the resignation of Pope Francis, it is indisputable that he spectacularly violated the pontifical secret he swore an oath to keep.

That is an earthquake for the Vatican diplomatic corps and the Roman Curia. The “pontifical secret” which binds them is not the confessional seal, nor is it as grave as the conclave seal for the cardinal electors, but it is most serious. After Viganò it will never be the same.

Archbishop Viganò justified the revelation of details he learned on the job on the grounds that his conscience did not permit him to keep corruption hidden. He brazenly invoked the mafia term omertà to speak about the code of silence he was breaking.

…

Curial officials and Vatican diplomats take their oaths very seriously. I have known dozens of them, many as close friends, and the norm is that they quite punctiliously refuse to discuss even routine matters that cross their desks.

For example, 10 days before the papal trip to Ireland, I asked an old friend, a current official in one of the Vatican congregations responsible for bishops, whether in fact there were any tribunals set up to judge bishops foreseen in the motu proprio of Pope Francis, Come una madre amorevole. He would not answer. I had not asked for any particulars, just whether it was even happening. (Pope Francis confirmed that such a case was underway on his return flight from Dublin.)

And the Vatican takes the oath seriously too. The VatiLeaks affair of a few years ago involved stolen and leaked documents by one who violated his oath, the butler of Benedict XVI. He was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced (though eventually pardoned).

Supporters of Pope Francis argue that the accusations have arisen primarily from the traditionalist camp of the church because so many traditionalists loathe the pope. Viganò is sometimes described as a traditionalist.

Indeed, supporters of Pope Francis turned their guns on Viganò very quickly. There are now allegations that he also is tainted. The New York Timesreported that Viganò has been accused of hindering a sexual misconduct investigation in Minnesota. If this is true, it marks Viganò out as another hypocrite trying to stiff the pope.

The progressives in the Roman Catholic Church see the traditionalists as people who want to turn the clock back to the medieval period; to go back to Latin, arcane rituals, and a loveless moral legalism. They claim the “trads” feel threatened by Pope Francis because his vision of a humbler, more humane church is a threat to their power and their vision.

A lot of traditionalists made their careers, after all, by being public warriors of a hard Catholic morality. They mouthed the conservative lines of the previous popes with an eye to getting a bishop’s mitre or a cardinal’s hat. With Pope Francis, all that work seems to count for nothing! That’s why they are so happy to torpedo a reigning pope, the progressives say. It is an act of revenge. It is spite.

There is probably quite a bit of truth in this.

On the other hand, the opponents of Pope Francis claim that something shady has been going on. They say that Pope Francis has done little to combat the abuses in the church and his public speeches of contrition and prayers are not enough to deal with the problem. The traditionalists accuse Pope Francis of being a scarcely-Catholic ultra-liberal left-winger, influenced by liberation theology. They claim his theology is scrambled and unclear. They also view him as an ecclesiastical tyrant. The pope is political animal, they claim, who fights with the viciousness of South American cutthroat politics. He stacks the Vatican with his own “yes men” and engages in petty retribution.

Pope Francis is possibly all of these things. It is hard to know for sure, given the crackling hostility within the Vatican. This “Holy City” is a hothouse, steamy and humid with petty grudges and politicking. It is a jungle where senior clerics hate each other venomously.

Father John Zuhlsdorf alluded to this very atmosphere on his blog earlier this week:

When I working in a Curial office I was at first rather taken aback by the style of letters I had to write, with flowery – to American ears – phrases and formulae. Why not just get to the point? What’s with acknowledging receipt of “Your Excellency’s is most esteemed letter under date of…”?

I eventually figured it out. The elaborate courtesy and formulae allowed people to sincerely disliked each other and vehemently disagreed to continue to communicate and get things done.

Francis is certainly in a difficult position because he heads a church that is rapidly becoming ungovernable.

The Council of Trent worked hard to give the See of St. Peter the illusion of a divine mandate and thus the guarantor of unity. But the 16th century polish – although very hard-wearing and long-lasting – can be softened and removed by modernism. Thus the shine is off. The papacy is fast regressing to the murderous intrigues of pre-Reformation skulduggery. The papal office itself is now contested territory.

Up until now, the crackle of gunfire has been muted. The war has been fought behind curtains. Shots in the dark. Whispers and rumours. Political signals and coded snubs.

But now the conflict is in the daylight. There has been a drive-by shooting at high noon. The gunman that pumped the trigger is Viganò.

And his ambush has worked, at least so far. Pope Francis is politically and morally crippled. Discussion about his fitness is omnipresent from the Catholic in the pew, to the secular media, to the clergy themselves. Benedict XVI proved it was possible to resign the job, and he quit due to age. Why couldn’t Francis step down too?

The question now on everyone’s lips, which Pope Francis has so far publicly refused to answer, is: “What did the Pope know and when did he know it?”

According to the Spectator, the evidence is mounting that Pope Francis knew about McCarrick. Yet Pope Francis has given no denials. Instead he flatly refused to address the Viganò testimony, telling journalists that they should judge the credibility of the accusations for themselves. He has also preached a homily recently in which he spoke of silence sometimes being the only acceptable response to false accusations.

The implication, with all the subtlety of a sack of hammers, is that the accusations are preposterous and beneath the pope’s dignity.

Now, it is quite possible that Pope Francis is a hapless casualty of the internecine conflict within the Roman Catholic Church. It is also quite possible that Pope Francis is as stained and tarnished as large numbers of senior clergy appear to be. We simply do not know.

All we know for certain is that Pope Francis has plenty of enemies. Many are his religious “brothers and sisters” – what a lovely lot! We know that there are large numbers of conservative Catholics who see Pope Francis as dangerous and heretical. Some have even prayed for his death, as one Polish priest was disciplined for doing recently.

We also know that Francis has plenty of friends who play hardball and show no mercy.

There’s a lot of water left to flow under this bridge.

We must take Solomon’s wisdom to heart and judge the case with balanced scales. This means we must let the situation run its course and sensibly, patiently, and intelligently wait for hard evidence to emerge before arriving at conclusions. For nobody deserves a trial by media, not even a pope, and nobody deserves to be condemned and hanged on the basis of Tweets, rumour, innuendo, and hearsay.

Pope John Paul II reigned for nearly 30 years. Much of the abuse that is now coming to light occurred under his pontificate. Moreover, many of the abusers that are being exposed were trained and nourished in the priestly arts while he was pope. A lot of these were flushed down the drain when the abuse scandal exploded in 2002. That year, and those following, the scandal was covered relentlessly by the media and the Catholic Church parted with countless millions of dollars in compensation and legal fees. A slow and shuddering change started to occur – it turns out to be very expensive to harbour perverted animals in your organisation – although many perpetrators remained hidden in the vast spiderweb of the Roman Catholic organisation.

What this means is that of the last three popes, Pope John Paul II sat on the biggest powder keg of them all. He was in charge before the secular authorities began the house cleaning; before the dirty linen started to get aired; before the law came after them. The question legitimately applies to Pope John Paul II. What did the Pope know and when did he know it? All of the evidence seems to indicate that John Paul II presided over a deeply corrupt, money-focused Vatican, and that he not only was disinterested in the issue of child abuse, but would not listen to reports that were sent to him about it.

There is no earthly way Pope John Paul II could not have known. The fact that nothing was done gives us a deep insight into the true nature of the Roman Catholic Church.

JOHN PAUL II – THE CONSUMMATE POLITICIAN

Let’s turn the clock back to 1978. Karol Wojtyla, a youngish Polish archbishop was elected by the conclave of the Roman Catholic Church. He took the papal name of Pope John Paul II. In short order, he proved to be wily and cunning politician.

John Paul II was able to be a good politician because he was a perplexing blend of inconsistent energies. His personality crackled with oddities. On the one hand, he yearned for traditional Catholic family values. He was particularly wont to glorify both the figure of mother and motherhood. He refused to buckle on the issue of birth control.

Yet, despite this staunch conservatism when it came to women he was exceedingly liberal in his views of other religions. He wanted Catholics to join forces with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and virtually any other halfway sizeable religion in order to influence the world for the better. After all, to engineer social justice you need numbers. If you get a bunch of religions on the same wagon, you have a lot of social justice warriors. And if John Paul II taught anything, it was definitely the Social Gospel.

Pragmatic and calculating when it came to inter-faith alliances, John Paul II was also a decided mystic. It was said that each morning he would crawl around a large map of the world praying for different nations. He is reported to have had “prophetic visions”, and to talk with the Virgin Mary. This tendency is not surprising since he was fiercely dedicated to the cult of the Virgin Mary, even giving her the attribution for saving his life during the assassination attempt by Mehmet Ali Agca:

Could I forget that the event in St. Peter’s Square took place on the day and at the hour when the first appearance of the Mother of Christ to the poor little peasants has been remembered for over sixty years at Fátima, Portugal? For in everything that happened to me on that very day, I felt that extraordinary motherly protection and care, which turned out to be stronger than the deadly bullet.

He was also an exceedingly clever politician.

It was the commensurate political skill of Pope John Paul II – who combined both liberal and conservative impulses in an inconsistent amalgam – that satisfied the two wings of the church for decades and kept them from tearing each other apart.

He achieved this state of Cold War by giving both sides theological morsels in turn. One month, for example, he would thunder out canonical law with the fire of a desert prophet and fiercely condemn liberation theology, birth control, and communism. The traditionalists would throw up their hands and cry, “Great is Pope John Paul II! He is our man.” Yet the liberals would mutter darkly and the shadows would begin to stir.

Then, a few months down the track, John Paul II would issue apologies for past crimes, or beatify national saints (which he did by the truckload), or soften the official stance on liturgical issues. He would talk about world peace, condemn consumerism, and proclaim St. Francis of Assisi the patron saints of ecologists. The liberals would throw up their hands and cry, “All is forgiven! We were in error. Great is John Paul II. He is our man.”

Shortly afterwards, he would simply wash, rinse, and repeat the process.

By this means he kept both traditionalists and liberals in stasis. He had a forceful and charismatic temper which when combined with his contradictory and unsystematic theological views, enabled everyone to claim him as his own. For example, I have an exceedingly liberal grandmother who firmly believed that Pope John Paul II was a great “spiritual man” and a liberal leader who held views similar to her own. By the same token, Father John Zuhlsdorf, a convinced traditionalist who trumpets the value of Latin and wants to revive countless archaic Catholic traditions, regards Pope John Paul II with similar reverence and respect. Zuhlsdorf counts him as a traditionalist defender of Catholic morality and of a tidy Catholic liturgy.

Pope John Paul II also managed to keep the Roman Curia – the secretive bureaucracy of the Vatican – on his side. He did this by never rocking the boat. During his 28 year pontificate, he did little to reform, investigate, or change the curia’s processes or privileges even following the nearly Hollywoodeque Banco Ambrosiano scandal and exposure of the crooked dealings of Roberto Calvi – the Italian known as “God’s banker” – who was connected with the Vatican.

The Banco Ambrosiano, of which the Vatican Bank was a majority shareholder, was used by the Mafia to run a money laundering operation and also by the Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due (P2). Propaganda Due was later found by a parliamentary investigation to be a secret criminal organisation with links to Argentina and numerous corrupt dealings involving banks. Propaganda Due was sometimes called a “state within a state” or a “shadow government” due to the large number of journalists, politicians, industrialists and military leaders who were involved with it.

Roberto Calvi was discovered in 1982 hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London with his clothes stuffed with bricks and cash in three different currencies totalling $14,000 (US). In 2007, Italian magistrates ruled his death a murder – not a suicide as it may have been intended to appear – and said the case was effectively closed and the five people charged with his murder were acquitted. The defence argued that too many people had an interest in his death, such as the mafia and Vatican officials.

The scandal should have torpedoed any remaining illusions that the Roman Curia and the Vatican administrative apparatus was “the most perfect government on earth”, as it has liked to present itself. In fact, it was an episode that should have troubled all but the most hardened consciences. For during the 25 years in which Calvi’s murder was repeatedly investigated by private and public investigators, time and again the Vatican was spoken of in connection to extreme corruption. Vatican business dealings with the Banco Ambrosiano meant that, through the nexus of the bank, they were commercially rubbing shoulders with criminal organisations that were implicated in murders.

One demonstration of its corruption was revealed more recently by Cardinal George Pell (who is awaiting sentencing following a trial for historic sexual abuse). Pell admitted that during his audit of Vatican finances, he had discovered hundreds of millions of euros that had not appeared on balance sheets. Moreover, he also admitted in an interview with the Catholic Herald that one of the problems of auditing Vatican finances was the resistance of each department to transparency. Naturally Pell used the euphemism “independence” but it is clear what is implied. Pell said:

I once read that Pope Leo XIII sent an apostolic visitor to Ireland to report on the Catholic Church there,” he writes. “On his return, the Holy Father’s first question was: ‘How did you find the Irish bishops?’ The visitor replied that he could not find any bishops, but only 25 popes.

So it was with the Vatican finances. Congregations, Councils and, especially, the Secretariat of State enjoyed and defended a healthy independence. Problems were kept ‘in house’ (as was the custom in most institutions, secular and religious, until recently). Very few were tempted to tell the outside world what was happening, except when they needed extra help.

Pell went on to drop a bombshell. Not only were Vatican finances healthy, but large pools of money were washing around the Vatican completely unaccounted for. One must ask the question, “Where did this money come from?” and “Who was profiting from this money while it was sitting unaccounted for?”. Pell, of course, gives no inkling about this:

It is important to point out that the Vatican is not broke. Apart from the pension fund, which needs to be strengthened for the demands on it in 15 or 20 years, the Holy See is paying its way, while possessing substantial assets and investments.

In fact, we have discovered that the situation is much healthier than it seemed, because some hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet. It is another question, impossible to answer, whether the Vatican should have much larger reserves.

Pell then frankly admits that the Vatican was involved with criminal activity, to such an extent that other European banks would not deal with it. He says:

Many will remember the scandals at the Vatican bank (IOR) in the early 1980s, with Archbishop Paul Marcinkus and the lay bankers Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi (who was famously found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge), and the Vatican being constrained to pay $406 million (£259 million) in compensation. Comparative quiet then returned, until the international laws against money laundering needed to be applied within the Vatican.

The authorities supervising the Vatican bank did not move swiftly enough, and some tens of millions of euros were frozen by the Bank of Italy, with many European banks refusing to deal with the Vatican. It was a grave situation where the worst was narrowly averted. It was only this November [2014], after years of dialogue and good work, that the €23 million (£18.3 million) were released.

All of this developed under the pontificate of Pope John Paul II who showed little interest in doing much about Vatican finances and this reflected his preference for the dirty linen of the Catholic Church to be kept under wraps – until it exploded.

Given the wretched condition of the Vatican administration under his reign, it is not at all surprising that there are significant numbers of people today who believe that Pope John Paul II was well aware of the abuse that ran like a plague through his church, and yet he did not take concerted action against it.

His supporters argue he did not know. Like the common peasant myth in Tsarist Russia, it was not the king himself who did not wish to act, but rather his evil officials who kept the truth from him. Likewise, supporters of John Paul II have said that had he known – had he been told – he would have vigorously sought to root it out. Unfortunately the corrupt curia prevented the knowledge from flowing through.

Such an argument (if true) confirms the rottenness of the Vatican administration, something that is now acknowledged even by the most ardent Catholics, but it is not really a credible argument. To claim that Pope John Paul II was actively denied knowledge of the prevalence of abuse, or that he had no knowledge of abuse during a 30 year period when literally thousands of abuse cases occurred and were reported, requires a faith that exceeds that of a simple believer in God. You would need to believe in supernatural ignorance, for that is what it would take for this argument to hold.

Contrarily, there is striking evidence that not only did Pope John Paul II know about the abuse, he actively sought to suppress its exposure.

The pontiff “turned a blind eye to the problems that were happening in Los Angeles,” said Joelle Casteix, Western Regional Director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

“The canonization of Pope John Paul II is very traumatic for victims of sexual abuse in the catholic church because they don’t see him as the unifying figure that many other Catholics do,” Casteix said. “They see him as someone who knew about sexual abuse, covered it up, promoted wrong doers and allowed more priests to molest kids.”

It is difficult not to come to the same conclusion articulated by Joelle Casteix, given that the Vatican has virtually drowned in cases of sickening child abuse for nearly two decades.

In February last year, the Business Standard magazine reported the comments made by Thomas Doyle to the Royal Commission inquiry into historical sexual abuse in Australia. Doyle alleges that Pope John Paul II had indeed known about the abuse:

Late Pope John Paul II was aware of priests sexually abusing children, and of efforts by the Catholic Church to cover up the allegations, an American canon lawyer claimed on Tuesday.

Thomas Doyle, an expert on cases of sexual abuse by the clergy, said this while testifying at a hearing here in Australia, Efe news reported.

Doyle is deposing before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in public and religious institutions.

He also said that in 1985 at least four US dioceses sent reports to the Vatican on child sexual abuse by priests.

Doyle went on to describe his personal involvement in trying to solicit support from Pope John Paul II for stamping out abusers within the Roman clergy:

One of these reports were prepared by Doyle himself, who requested a bishop be sent down to Luisiana to deal with cases of paedophilia.

The report was sent by courier to the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, Cardinal John Krol, who took it to the Vatican the next day, said Doyle.

He added Krol handed the report to the Pope, who read the document and named a bishop for the purpose – AJ Quinn – within three days.

However, Quinn, he said: “turned out to be part of the problem, not part of the solution, because he was trying to figure how to continue with the cover-up.”

After being informed, Pope John Paul II appointed a bishop who proceeded to cover up the abuse. Given John Paul II’s political instincts, it is again questionable whether this could be an accident. If Thomas Doyle can be believed – and there is no reason to question his integrity – there are only two possibilities here. Either John Paul II wanted to minimise the fallout and scotch tape the situation up, and therefore gave implicit or explicit instructions to that effect, or the culture in the Vatican was so noxious that the bishop concluded off his own bat that his sole duty in being awarded the task was to cover it up as best as possible.

Doyle went on to say:

Doyle’s claims came a day after a detailed report by the Australian Catholic Church that revealed around 4,500 people reported cases of child sexual abuse by members of the clergy between 1980 and 2015.

Presented by Gail Furness, the counsel assisting the commission, the report said between 1950 and 2010, 1,880 alleged perpetrators were identified — 572 priests, 597 religious brothers, and 96 religious sisters and others.

These figures are mind-blowing. The numbers provided by the Australian Catholic Church themselves, indicate that in the space of 60 years there were 1,880 perpetrators of sexual abuse. Given that each perpetrator probably offended many times, and despite the fact that perpetrators would not have been identified in consistent batches, it still provides an average of 31 offenders per year over a 60 year period. Or, to word it another way, it means that on average two clerics began to abuse children in the Roman Catholic Church every single month across a 60 year period.

This is not including the physical abuse that was documented by the Royal Commission, or the frequent efforts to get justice from the victims.

Even supporters of Pope John Paul II admit that his response to endemic levels of horrific abuse was “slow”:

Supporters of the late Polish Pope say he was slow to wake up to the enormity of the sex abuse scandal because in his homeland he had witnessed the Communist authorities use trumped-up allegations against the clergy to attack the Church.

They also claim that his aides may have known of the scandals but kept them from the Pope – an argument discounted by victims’ groups.

The Telegraph article continues:

In Austria, the Church has paid token compensation to 1,800 victims of sex abuse in return for their silence, and not a single priest has been defrocked or removed, he said.

Nicky Davis, 50, from Australia, another member of SNAP and a former victim, said: “All of us here were abused because John Paul II chose not to act in the way that the Vatican claims he acted. We don’t believe it’s saintly behaviour to allow sex abuse to continue for a 27-year reign. He could have used his enormous power to save children but instead he decided to save the reputation of the Church.

And victims ominously comment on Pope Francis’ response as far back as 2014:

Victims’ groups are also highly critical of Pope Francis, saying that he has taken no tangible steps during his 13-month papacy to crack down on abusive clergy, instead simply forming a committee to address the issue.

In an interview in March which prompted outrage from survivors of sexual abuse, he claimed that “no one else has done more” than the Catholic Church to root out paedophilia.

The Church was “perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility,” he told Corriere della Sera, the Italian newspaper. “Yet the Church is the only one to have been attacked.”

Mrs Blaine said: “Francis is cleaning up the Vatican bureaucracy and demoting bishops who live in luxurious mansions but he has taken no action to protect children. Sexual predators remain in the Church today. Rather than turn them over to the police, and release the Vatican’s documents on predators priests, he has just set up a commission.”

Pope John Paul II also seemed to keep company with some very shady characters, some of whom were later found to be abusers of children and rank hypocrites, even by the rock-bottom standards of the Roman Catholic clergy. One of these was the leader and founder of the Legion of Christ, a Mexican priest by the name of Marcial Maciel Degollado. He was eventually exposed as once being addicted to drugs, being expelled twice from seminary as a young man, and having kept two mistresses – one of which was given a luxury apartment in Madrid with funds not disclosed. He is also known to have fathered six children – although there could well be others – and to have abused possibly a hundred children, two of them his own.

Bizarrely, the order he founded – the Legion of Christ – was meant to form the character of priests and seminarians. It is little wonder it has come under scrutiny given the consistently weak moral calibre of its founder. Nonetheless, the Legion of Christ now describes Macial’s actions as “reprehensible”. The Vatican also has described him as “immoral” and labelled his behaviour “true crimes”. Yet, for all of this outrage and fury, the Vatican was well aware of the accusations of child abuse that accompanied the man wherever he went.

Dozens of victims in multiple countries made sexual abuse allegations against Maciel over the course of several decades, dating back to the 1950s.

Though he was suspended in 1956 from his leadership of the Legion by Pope Pius XII after being accused of abusing youths in Mexico, Cardinal Clemente Micara, the Vicar of Rome, reinstated him in 1958 after his predecessor’s death and Maciel enjoyed a long and prosperous career despite the claims of as many as 100 victims.

As the claims mounted, Pope John Paul II knuckled down. He offered praise and protection for a man about which there was no possible way he could not have be aware of the allegations against him. How are we to understand this gaping lapse in judgement?

It could be understood as an instance of Pope John Paul II’s pigheadedness, as his supporters claim. The pope was a stubborn old man, and like many stubborn old men could not be told. Maybe he was just firmly placing his head in the sand, and that because he had come to believe the best of Maciel he would not hear a word spoken against him. If this is true, then the pope was strikingly naive to the point of utter stupidity. Had his long pontificate with the thousands of accusations of child abuse against “upstanding” clergy not taught him anything?

Or, is it more likely that this is a case of Pope John Paul II’s razor-sharp pragmatism at work? After all, Maciel sent streams of money to the Vatican. Was toleration of a serial child abuser the price that had to be paid for the church coffers to be filled?

The Globalpost goes on describing an extraordinary pattern of apparently inexplicable protection, which involved not just the pope but the Vatican administration as well:

A man of great charisma, and the greatest fundraiser of the modern church, Maciel cultivated a relationship with John Paul II, using scenes of the two men in video-tapes that the Legion distributed to its growing base of benefactors. Maciel accompanied John Paul on papal visits to Mexico in 1979, 1990 and 1993, and in 1994 he was celebrated in “an open letter by Pope John Paul II celebrating Maciel’s 50th anniversary as a priest, appeared in major newspapers of Mexico City, as a paid advertisement, celebrating Maciel as ‘an efficacious guide to youth.’”

In 1997 a Hartford Courant investigation by Gerald Renner and Jason Berry identified nine seminary victims of Maciel in on-the-record interviews. The Vatican refused to comment. In 1998, the ex-Legionaries filed a recourse in Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s tribunal seeking Maciel’s ouster. But John Paul continued praising him, and the canon law case went nowhere.

Letters sent directly to the Vatican in a diplomatic bag were never acted upon:

Vaca entered the Legion in Mexico in 1947, at age 10. Repeatedly abused by Maciel in Spain from age 12 through adolescence in Rome, the young priest went to Orange, Conn., as the Legion’s U.S. director. In 1976, when Vaca left the Legion, joining the Diocese of be Rockville Centre, Long Island, N.Y., he sent a blistering 12-page letter to Maciel, naming 20 other victims.

With support of Bishop John R. McGann, he sent the letter to the Vatican in a formal protest, which achieved nothing. With McGann’s support he petitioned the Vatican to punish Maciel again, sent via diplomatic pouch from the Vatican Embassy, without action. His final attempt in 1989, again through Vatican channels, included an impassioned cover letter to John Paul specifying what Maciel did.”

According to a Newsweek feature article published in 2013, Marciel was swimming in cash, regularly carrying $10,000 on his person:

Meanwhile, he held great prominence in Rome. Cardinals relished the grand dinners with a mariachi band at the Legion college. He traveled relentlessly, each time taking $10,000 in cash with no questions asked from his subalterns.

He also cleverly directed cash into the right pockets, not only giving insight into the calculated nature of his corruption, but into the corruption that exists at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church amongst people who are supposedly charged with the oversight of the eternal souls of other people. Newsweek reports:

Gaining access to the small chapel in the Apostolic Palace turned on a flow of donations Maciel allegedly orchestrated to Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Polish assistant to John Paul and gatekeeper of attendance at the private masses, who admitted only a few world leaders.

In 1995, according to former Legion insiders, Maciel sent $1 million via Dziwisz in advance of a papal trip to Poland. In 1997, according to a priest who left the Legion and spoke on the condition of anonymity, a wealthy family from Mexico gave Dziwisz $50,000 to attend a private papal mass. Dziwisz, now a cardinal in Kraków, did not answer my questions about the incident, sent by fax in 2010 and translated into Polish. “This happened all the time,” the ex-Legionary told me. “It was always in cash. And in dollars.”

While the Vatican has no constitution or statutes that would make such transactions illegal, a second priest who says he gave funds to Dziwisz said, “You don’t know where the money is going. It’s an elegant way of giving a bribe.”

He targeted powerful cardinals:

In Rome, Sodano was a “cheerleader for the Legion,” as several ex-Legion priests told me. “He’d come give a talk at Christmas, and they’d give him $10,000,” said one. Another recalled a $5,000 donation to Sodano. (Sodano has also declined my interview requests.)

And when he finally was kicked out of his position, he left an organisation that was worth more than the economy of several small island nations combined:

The Legion had a $650 million annual budget and $1 billion in assets by May 2006, when Ratzinger, as Benedict, banished Maciel to “a life of prayer and penitence.” The Vatican communiqué did not stipulate what he had done. But Maciel had “more than 20 and less than 100” victims, according to an unnamed Vatican official quoted by John Allen in the National Catholic Reporter.

The abuser was never punished by the Roman Catholic Church, unless retiring to a villa to pray is considered a form of punishment:

Maciel retired to Jacksonville, Florida, and a house with a pool in a gated community the Legion bought to comply with Rome’s penitential order. He died January 30, 2008, surrounded by several priests, his daughter Normita, and her mother, Norma Hilda Baños. Several days later he was buried at a family crypt in his hometown, Cotija de la Paz.

His son Raul watched the news on TV in Cuernavaca; several years had passed since he had been heard from, though Raul in subsequent interviews said he never forgot how the man he knew as dad sexually abused him through adolescence, a charge now pending in a civil lawsuit against the Legion in Connecticut.

The Legion website announced that Maciel had gone to heaven. It took them another year to disclose his paternity, which sent shock waves through the movement, at which point top Legionaries began apologizing to the pedophilia victims whom they had attacked for years as participants in a dark conspiracy.

At that point the Vatican, which had known about the daughter for four and a half years, announced an investigation of the Legion. In 2010 the Vatican took the scandal-battered order into receivership, something unique in the modern church.

According to Raul Gonzalez, his father seemed well aware that his time would be up after John Paul II died:

“My dad told my mom that when John Paul II dies, he was going to be in trouble,” said Raul Gonzalez, who filed a lawsuit in 2010 claiming that he is one of Maciel’s children and alleging the late priest molested him beginning when he was 7 years old.

If true, this suggests a deep and disturbing relationship between the pope and Marciel.

The Roman Catholic Church now faces the circling wolves of secular authority. Governments around the world have come to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church is incapable of restraining the bestial impulses of its clergy and cannot be trusted to act properly toward victims when their cases come to light. In other words, government authorities no longer have any confidence that the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church can be counted on to do much more than cover up evil behaviour.

In Australia, state governments are determined to pass laws that would force priests to divulge the secrets of the confessional to the police when they hear confessions involving sexual abuse. This would mean that priests would have to violate the much-ballyhooed “seal of the confession” which forbids priests from revealing anything mentioned in the confessional booth on pain of excommunication. The Roman Catholic Church is quite robust in its rejection of the new laws; more robust, indeed, than it ever has been in rooting out and disposing of the evil people who have infested its hierarchy.

To some extent, the new laws are symbolic because they are unenforceable. If something is revealed in the confession, who would know? And if a confession is anonymous, how can it be reported? It has also been pointed out that sexual predators do not generally confess their sins to priests because they have no conscience. They have rationalised their abuse and justified it to themselves. Finally, the popular image of Catholics regularly going up to a confessional booth to spill the beans to Father McHellfire is far from the reality for most modern Catholics in the Western World. Confession is no longer the norm for most Catholics.

But Australian state governments are – understandably – determined to send a message to a church that has been gravely implicated in scandals involving children. The message is this: the days of your power are fading and like it or not your church will be ruled by secular law because you clearly cannot govern your own. It is, in one sense, the assertion of the primacy of parliament over the Catholic church. And if there was any hesitation on the part of lawmakers about implementing these laws, the disgraceful spectacle over the last few weeks will have dispelled any doubt.

Evolutionary theory is stoutly defended by atheists and progressives because it provides one of the major planks of their worldview.

The theory is cherished and frequently clothed with an aura of infallibility. Evolution is a fact, they thunder, and anyone who disputes this is worthy of ridicule and contempt. Such a person must be unenlightened and unintelligent. Christian scientists and scholars in significant and reputable universities who question evolution are typically deemed suspect. When their questions raise serious challenges to the theory, they can be safely dismissed as fringe nutters or fundamentalists. “Real scientists” do not question evolution.

Richard Dawkins put it this way:

One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact.

It is no wonder that evolution is aggressively proclaimed as a “fact” for it serves an important psychological and moral purpose in the atheist, progressive, and liberal worldview. It provides a mechanism that lets a person to occupy a godless worldview in a way that seems intellectually coherent. This is something Dawkins acknowledged in his book The Blind Watchmaker (1986):

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

In other words, Darwinian evolution provides answers to the questions any fulfilling worldview must address. It answers the issues of origins – the perennial question “where did we come from?” – and thus offers a means by which human beings can establish an alternative morality that is not based on revelation. Thus evolution holds a place of supreme importance for nearly every secularist.

Moreover, it is the single bang in the cannon. There is nothing else. If you want to live independent of God, then evolution is the only horse in town as far as the secularist is concerned. Therefore, no matter how many difficulties exist in the theory (such as the galactic jump from inorganic matter to the first organic cell), and no matter how many holes there are in theory’s key assumptions (such as the dearth of mutations that increase genetic information), Darwinian evolution remains an untouchable Moloch. It has to be. The secularist has no alternative.

But Darwinian evolution is even more than a worldview or an ideology, it is also used as a source of moral and intellectual supremacy. It is the battering ram that is hurled against the ramparts of the Church. It is aimed squarely at orthodox Christians, that turbulent band of medievalists who bunker inside their religious fortress and stubbornly refuse to abandon the Creator!

Such is the oppressive pride that is impossible to wade through the words of social liberals, or Dawkins, or other celebrity atheists without encountering their extreme contempt for anyone who does not share their viewpoint. Dawkins’ opines, with his characteristic certitude:

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

Laurence M. Krauss, a “notorious atheist” at Arizona State University (who has spent much of this year being investigated for sexual harassment), goes even further:

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

One may note the mystical element contained in the writings of these materialists. You are made out of stardust, Krauss says, you are the product of powerful cosmic forces.

Krauss’ above statement from his book A Universe From Nothing (2012) is typical of what might be described as Darwinist theology. Theology does seem to be the correct term, for the cited text has quite clearly passed from the realm of empirical science and into the realm of myth. It is myth woven into poetry. It is a genre of writing that shares striking similarities with spiritual literature, as it attempts to evoke awe and wonderment. It also serves an apologetic function in its naked attempt to persuade people to abandon Christianity.

This tells us a lot about the place of evolution in the firmament of secular thought. Does any other theory get this sort of treatment by secularists, humanists and atheists? Not at all! No scientist talks in this fashion about germ theory. No scientist writes books of florid prose in which he seeks to inspire faith and awe at the theory of gravitation. No scientist uses the heliocentric model of the solar system as a basis to “forget Jesus”. It is upon evolution and its allied cosmology alone that they make this call – evolutio solus.

But evolution is not just the weapon of radical atheists. Evolution also spills over into political disputes as well. During the United States presidential election in 2008, Matt Damon appeared in an interview that went viral. In the interview he challenged Sarah Palin’s suitability for high office, in part, based on her beliefs about origins.

Damon could have chosen to challenge Palin on a wide range of legitimate political issues. After all, her governorship in Alaska had more than its fair share of controversies, and her performance during the campaign did not inspire confidence, even among conservatives. Even the Republican presidential candidate himself, John McCain, later expressed regret about choosing her as his running mate. So there was plenty of material. Despite that, Damon chose to specifically allude to issues of origins.

Damon said:

I think there’s a really good chance that Sarah Palin could be president, and I think that’s a really scary thing because I don’t know anything about her. I don’t think in eight weeks I’m gonna know anything about her. I know that she was a mayor of a really, really small town, and she’s governor of Alaska for less than two years. I just don’t understand. I think the pick was made for political purposes, but in terms of governance, it’s a disaster.

You do the actuary tables, you know, there’s a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn’t survive his first term, and it’ll be President Palin. And it really, you know, I was talking about it earlier, it’s like a really bad Disney movie, you know, the hockey mom, you know, “I’m just a hockey mom from Alaska”—and she’s the president. And it’s like she’s facing down Vladimir Putin and, you know, using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink, you know, it’s just absurd. It’s totally absurd, and I don’t understand why more people aren’t talking about how absurd it is. I … it’s a really terrifying possibility.

The fact that we’ve gotten this far and we’re that close to this being a reality is crazy. Crazy. I mean, did she really—I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. That’s an important … I want to know that. I really do. Because she’s gonna have the nuclear codes, you know. I wanna know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago or if she banned books or tried to ban books. I mean, you know, we can’t have that.

He plainly suggests that if a person has the temerity to believe in creationism, by definition they are not responsible enough to have access to the nuclear codes. The unmistakable inference is that creationists must be stupid, or dangerous, or both.

But Damon’s statement goes further than just Palin. Since most Christians believe in the divine creation of the universe – and many believe in Young Earth Creationism – and since either belief necessitates a rejection of the evolutionary timeline, by logical extension bible-affirming Christians must also be stupid, dangerous and irresponsible. And they are to be held in contempt by their sophisticated betters.

The liberal glitterati abounds with exactly this viewpoint.

In 2014 there was a much ballyhooed debate between Bill Nye “the Science Guy” and Ken Ham the founder of Answers in Genesis. A year after the debate the National Geographic published an interview with Bill Nye.

The piece opened with:

Last February, the former engineer defended the theory of evolution in a debate with young-Earth creationist Ken Ham, a vocal member of a group that believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Nye’s decision to engage Ham kicked up plenty of criticism from scientists and creationists alike.

The experience prompted the celebrity science educator to write a “primer” on the theory of evolution called Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. In his new book, Nye delights in how this fundamental discovery helps to unlock the mysteries of everything from bumblebees to human origins to our place in the universe.

Having established Nye’s credentials as a crusader for evolution, the National Geographic asks its first question:

Who do you hope will read this book?

To which Nye replies:

Grown-ups who have an interest in the world around them, people coming of age who have an interest in science, people who still want to know how the world works.

This is the big concern of mine with respect to the organization Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham and all those guys: their relentless, built-in attempts to indoctrinate a generation of science students on a worldview that is obviously wrong.

Two interesting things emerge in this statement. Firstly, Nye implies that people who will be interested in evolution are “grown ups” and those “coming of age”.

Now, he might simply be talking about age groups of the people who would read his book. To understand his comment in this way would certainly be the most straightforward interpretation, except that throughout the interview the themes of maturity and intelligence repeatedly comes up. For instance, he talks about a “mature society” that can filter out the bad ideas. He calls creationism “inanity”. He says that Ken Ham is trying to “indoctrinate a generation of science students”. He says his “breath was taken away” when he first encountered creationists. He calls the creationism “silly”.

But he also specifically attacks the worldview of creationists. To have a worldview that hinges on a belief that God created the heavens and earth, says Nye, is “obviously wrong”. The inescapable conclusion from these comments is that Christians must not be mature and probably not very intelligent.

Last year, in a tabloid piece in USA Today, Tom Krattenmaker wrote:

Creationists will believe what they want to believe. But they should know the consequences. Continued fighting to promote creationism is hurting religion’s credibility in an age when science and technology are perceived as reliable sources of truth and positive contributors to society. Anecdotal and polling evidence implicate religion’s anti-science reputation in the drift away from church involvement — especially among younger adults, nearly 40% of whom have left organized religion behind.

Krattenmaker is a self-confessed secularist who wrote the book: Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower: Finding Answers in Jesus For Those Who Don’t Believe. He also writes an occasional blog for The Humanist.

Krattenmaker is about as secular as you can get. He supports fashionable liberal shibboleths and coordinates projects arising from Yale Divinity School. His articles for TheHumanist seem generally enthusiastic about the supposed decline of the Church and Christianity. His conclusion is typical of a secularist liberal. It is deeply unfashionable to believe in creationism, says Krattenmaker, because it is anti-science and this drives people away from religion. In this he echoes what so many have said before him, and what the majority of liberals continue to say today: “the Church must change or die“.

Such is the supreme arrogance and folly of secularists, humanists, liberals, and atheists when their words are contrasted against those uttered by the Church’s divine Founder who promised, “I will build my Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it“. That Founder knew a thing or two about the universe. For he made it.

More than ten years ago liberal views seemed to be making galloping progress.

Back then, the orthodoxy was virtually unchallenged. Identity politics was the incontestable ideology that had made giant strides across the moral landscape. In nearly all of the cultural institutions in the West – from museums, to libraries, to parliaments, to entertainment – the secular liberal worldview not only seemed riveted in place, but appeared to be in a state of cancerous expansion.

It was a different world fifteen years ago.

On one hand, the institutions of power largely dictated to the people. To have cultural influence you needed to invest in hard infrastructure like a TV studio or a publishing house. Or you needed to rise through the ranks of an institution. Every once in a while, like Martin Luther, someone might make a tilt at reforming an institution from the inside, but, as Luther himself discovered, this is not usually a winning strategy when the institution does not want to take its medicine. Besides, it was hard to make change when the deck appeared to be heavily stacked against anyone who held to a worldview centered on continuity and moral consistency.

In the early 2000’s traditional boundaries, like marriage, did still exist. In fact, it was even still possible for a Democratic president opposed to same-sex marriage to come to power in the United States. But though the boundaries remained, it was a foregone conclusion by nearly everyone (especially despondent Christians) that these structures were doomed.

Many concluded that the march of liberalism was unstoppable, and some of us sunk into a pervading sense of hopelessness. Like ill-equipped defenders in the trenches, it sometimes felt that the best we could do was set up flimsy wooden barricades only to stand back and watch as the enemy tanks smashed their way through. It often seemed as if nothing Christians or conservatives did worked.

The Proposition 8 ballot in California was a classic example. Organised by defenders of marriage in 2008, California voted narrowly to eliminate provisions for same-sex marriage. Despite winning the popular vote, the proposition was overturned by courts after a convoluted legal process. Thus, even when a majority of the electorate expressed a preference for conservative social policy, their wishes were trampled over by a handful of judges. In such an atmosphere, what hope remained?

Near-nihilistic despair was palpable within Christian circles. Even a cursory reading of apologetic materials from the time will attest to the general sense of gloom. Piles of articles were published by Christian scholars lamenting the apparent decay of the Church. Other Christians sighed and declared that the moral condition was due to the decline of prayer in schools. Still others were worried by the lack of Christian and conservative influence within academic circles, fueled (in part) by David Horowitz, the editor of FrontPage Magazine, who published evidence suggesting that the ratio of liberal academics to conservative ones ran at about 10 to 1. Other Christian scholars referred to the sense of “post-Christian” torpor.

And on it went. In a way, the early 2000’s was a period of protracted mourning for the death of a short-lived era of cultural Christian supremacy – a supremacy that actually did the Church no favours. It was accompanied by tremendous pessimism. It seemed everyone wanted to go back the halcyon days when children prayed at school and most people in communities trotted along to church – and try as they might to offer solutions, most of these were focused on trying to rehabilitate the golden past.

Thus the Christian attitude of those years was often far removed from the unbridled optimism and cheerfulness of the Apostles as they set out into a far bleaker world dominated by the dark sophisticated totalitarianism of the Roman Empire.

This pessimism produced crooked fruit. Ten years ago, the discussion among believers was sometimes tragically silly (and naive) perhaps reflecting a theological or spiritual paralysis; a nearly existential shock at the suddenness of the moral collapse. At the time, a lot of Christian discussion centered around the need to inoculate Christians – especially the young – against the ravages of the culture. We will lose quite a few along the way, went the attitude, since the society is doomed and our heyday is past, but hopefully we can salvage something.

This ecclesiastical salvage operation did not involve a proclamation of the glories and certainties of the Most High Jesus Christ with thundering apostolic confidence from pulpits. Rather, the preferred methodology was programmes and techniques that focused more on behaviour, improving critical statistics (like teenage pregnancy rates among children of Christians), and other measurable criteria.

The late 1990’s and early 2000’s are pockmarked with religious fads. For example, one idea that did the rounds was that young Christian men should be trained and disciplined to think of themselves as medieval knights. Robert Lewis’ (1997) book Raising A Modern-Day Knight, was particularly instrumental in the explosion of knight-themed discipleship. One website introduces the technique in this way:

Christian youth listen closely when knighthood themes are used to convey Christian truth. We have seen rooms of hundreds of youth in today’s churches instantly quieted when a knight dressed in full armor comes to teach a lesson. Sword play, stories, and skits surrounding the knight theme have proven to be a highly effective way of conveying God’s truth to young audiences.

Another idea that flourished ten years ago was that young people should have chaperones when they date, or that dating should be abolished altogether among Christians and replaced by “courtship”. This was spearheaded by a book published by Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997), as if the method by which young people met each other and got to know their partner was a guarantee of future marital success. Then there was the strange “purity ring” movement in which young people would wear rings to keep them in mind of a hypothetical spouse, coupled with the very odd “virginity pledges” that young people were urged to sign by some churches.

And on it went. These silver bullets have not aged well.

But today, things are different. Winds of change are blowing through the stale air. Not just in the Church but in the wider society as well. There is a newness of thought (although really, it is the rediscovery of the brilliance of the Christian worldview) that is starting to make its presence known. These “New Thinkers” are combating the acidic triad of political correctness, secular liberalism, and identity politics. If Christians want to make inroads for the gospel unquestionably they need to set their sails to catch this new wind and ride it so that they can have a serious impact.

This is because insightful and sceptical thinkers in the New Media have finally reached a critical mass. A new intellectual spirit is emerging – one that is bold, that rebels against the cultural orthodoxy, and champions the human birthright to be free to think and speak. The New Media is dominated by these New Thinkers and they actively threaten the empires of the Old Media. They do this through the power of their material, but also because they have adopted some of the timeless tools of the Church. The New Thinkers, for example, engage in street debate, in old-school lectures, and utilise the spirit of free speech respectfully yet intelligently, just as it was intended to be used. The New Thinkers are not generally dogmatic. They purposefully contrast ideas and let their audience make up their minds about the strength of them.

Above all, the New Thinkers are saying interesting things because they are saying things that have long needed to be said. The ideas they are tackling have been considered to be politically taboo, suppressed by the rigid orthodoxies of the elites. But they are also examining issues from an interesting angle, such as applying real world data sets to interpreting problems and arriving at novel solutions. This is very threatening to an ideologically-based worldview like secular liberalism which requires certain data to be ignored, or suppressed, or explained away.

In the process, the New Thinkers are deconstructing the cherished shibboleths of the left. This is being done logically, scientifically, medically, and morally, and their arguments are irresistible. This is the direction the battle is moving. Bad ideas are being exploded, but not with sophisticated word play and emotional sob stories, but by simply pointing to the real world. Reality itself, as expressed by hard scientific fact and by living experience, is proving to be a devastating weapon against many of the tenets of identity politics.

Increasingly, Christians are in the forefront of this intellectual wave, although non-Christians are perhaps still better represented on this coming crest. Nonetheless, it is a wave that is strengthening the Church’s collective intellectual and philosophical thought. We are being sharpened. We are being shaped for God’s purpose.

And it is not before time.

Our culture urgently needs antibiotics, since it is now clear that secular liberalism and identity politics are beyond cure or correction. They cannot be safely harnessed for anyone’s good, and both social philosophies are rocketing downward into bizarre and freakish radicalism with the pedal firmly planted to the floor.

Secular liberalism has become a grotesque circus of ideas; a festival of insanity, where, for example, mental disorders are normalised and the mentally healthy are pressured to behave in dysfunctional ways. Identity politics has become the realm where unhealthy lifestyles are celebrated as if they were healthy; death is celebrated as an individual right; and the whole of society is upbraided unless it follows the madness. A vivid example of this is the Size Acceptance Movement (sometimes called “Size Diversity”) with its manifestly false slogan “health at any size“.

Then there are the sinister thugs of the Antifa movement which do represent a serious threat to citizen freedoms. These are tacitly aided by the liberal media. For while the liberal media has no problem excoriating Neo-Nazis even though their members are cartoon characters and their numbers are minuscule, it has a much harder time even mentioning the crimes of Antifa. Indeed, the liberal press seldom condemns or even mentions Antifa, despite their numbers being much higher and despite their blatant, criminal, and well-documented efforts to shut down legitimate public speeches and lectures they happen to dislike.

These radicals dress in black, cover their faces in masks, intimidate people with the “wrong” beliefs, and engage in violent and destructive behaviour. They bluster and roar that their opponents are fascists. And yet their behaviour is indistinguishable from the bully tactics of the Brownshirts in Wiemar Germany or the Blackshirts in fascist Italy. It seems you can get away with mirroring evil if you just shout loud enough that you hate the evil you are imitating. The liberal media will certainly give you a free pass.

The more the lunacy flows out of the ungodly worldview of liberalism, the greater the pillory it receives. There are now hundreds of Youtube channels that are dedicated to compiling the shrieking, sanctimonious, melodramatic and even violent outbursts of identarians. (Just a few examples can be found here, here, and here). These are presented as forms of comedic entertainment and they are wildly popular. People operating these channels are clocking up views and money from doing nothing other than sticking video segments together, without even the whisper of commentary. This is because the insane behaviour and complete lack of reason speaks for itself.

Whether it is college students introducing themselves with the prissy phrase “My name is Shaynalah and my pronouns are…“, or the well-documented arrest of a young man for calling a police horse “gay”, or videos of police smashing the stuffing out of protesters (to the applause of all onlookers) for holding up traffic on a busy road, liberalism has become a movement of comedy. Ridicule. And contempt. People either find it amusing in its lunacy, or they find it horrific in its intellectual violence and mutant thought. Others have such antipathy toward it that this expresses itself in interesting ways. For example, there are channels dedicated to showing protesters being beaten up by police or getting injured by angry bystanders. These videos are popular.

It has become very obvious that liberal social ideology is not based on meaningful thought, but an internal contest for virtue, and this is why it is dangerous. The animating impulse behind most of its ideas is the sheer force of emotion – self-righteousness coupled to melodrama. These emotions always race to the edge. Always try to get a peg or two higher. You have to continually jack up to ever-escalating levels of sanctimony in order to be always more virtuous. The melodrama then becomes more juvenile, shrill, and self-indulgent until the melodrama gets to the point where mere words are seen as murderous bullets that cripple a person’s entire life if they are heard, or even if they are anticipated but not heard (e.g. trigger warnings!). This never-ending climb up an emotional Mount Fuji is exhausting. No society can sustain such faux virtue forever.

Liberal social ideology is predicated on “guiltifying” people into silence with magic mantras like “that’s extremely offensive“. It is built on harnessing the power of the state, whether by criminalising certain beliefs or criminalising certain words. Most chillingly of all, liberalism has harnessed censorship, speech codes, and the social media pitchfork brigade – the “unintellgensia” – who set out to get people sacked if they do not like their opinions. Unable to engage on the level of rational discourse, all that is left is force.

Above all, liberal social ideology is built on massive contradictions. It is these contradictions that the New Thinkers in the New Media are diligently exposing. This work may seem insubstantial but it is actually producing a quiet revolution deep in the currents of the culture, far from the surface waters of TV and Hollywood. Most significantly, it is making inroads among young people, particularly young men.

It is within these realms that Christians must work. When we can, preaching the gospel. When that is not possible, Christians must preach a worldview based on the gospel. A worldview of integrity, moral sanity, of freedom and liberty for the human mind and soul. A worldview of personal responsibility. A worldview that confronts error with reality. Such an approach will destabilise identity politics and liberalism because it is already doing so. This very hour. In fact, the increasing intolerance of elites and the demands for censorship by the Old Media is proof that the edifice is crumbling.

Far from quitting social media, Christians need to be more busy on Facebook, personal blogs, in online public discussions, on Instagram, and on Youtube. They need to engage regularly, intelligently, and with an attractive confidence and poise.

For social media is the cultural point where the New Thought and the New Media are ushering in a generation of change. This is where we must be at work, and have the greatest opportunities to be fishers of men, and make disciples, or at least build sympathy and admiration for the robustly Christian view. It is at this nexus of people and technology – this welded seam – where the liberal empire is weakest and most susceptible to defeat. This is where Christians can unquestionably make a cultural impact and advance Christ’s Kingdom.

It is time for every Christian, great and small, to be at work in this realm, emboldened to say with St. Paul: “I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of salvation unto all who believe“.

Provocation

We live too much in time. We’re too earth bound. We see as other men see; we think as other men think. We invest our time as the world invests it. We're supposed to be a different breed of people.

I believe that the church of Jesus Christ needs a new revelation of the majesty of God. We’re all going to stand one day, can you imagine it- at the judgement seat of Christ to give an account for the deeds done in the body. This is the King of kings. He’s the Judge of judges, and it’s the Tribunal of tribunals. There’s no court of appeal after it. The verdict is final. -Leonard Ravenhill

LIBRARY

@ Reformers OnlineDr Martyn Lloyd-Jones' three part sermon on true happiness is published in a slender and readable volume. In these sermons, Dr Lloyd-Jones reveals the depth of his journey into the wisdom and heart of God through his word and the way in which God's word is always applicable to man's true need.

@AmazonA Chance to Die is a vibrant portrayal of Amy Carmichael, an Irish missionary and writer who spent fifty-three years in south India without furlough. There she became known as "Amma," or "mother," as she founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, a refuge for underprivileged children.

@Free Grace PressThis substantial volume provides a portrait of the life of Leonard Ravenhill, an English evangelist, pastor and preacher whose life is an example of a man truly driven by a deep appreciation of the greatness of eternity and the desire to be a true-hearted servant to his Lord.

@Barnes and Noble This 1994 classic is becoming somewhat harder to find more than 20 years on, but is an unforgettable read. Drawing from historic, timeless Christian convictions, Allison categorises heresies and shows that all modern heresies are not new. It is a short text, beautifully written, and edifying.